A public school in war time

a*

A PUBLIC SCHOOL IN WAR TIME

+
A PUBLIC SCHOOL
IN WAR TIME

By S. P. B. MAIS

" Here and here did England help me :
how can I help England?"

R. Browning,

Homt- Thoughts, from the Sea.

LONDON:

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.

1916

All rights reservtd

TO

MY WIFE

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I WISH to express my sincere gratitude to the
Editor of Tlte School Guardian for leave to reprint
several of the sketches in this book.

vii

PREFACE

The Public Schools have been for many years
now the object of much strange criticism, the
greater part of which has run in two main
channels : the most readable and undoubtedly
the most just being that of the great novelists
of our time who, themselves unhappy at school
just as they are miserable in the equally im-
perfect adult world, have given full rein to their
spleen in uncontrollable abuse. The other
school of critics has been (unwittingly) more
damning : it consists of those successful clergy-
men, dons, and schoolmasters who have never
had reason to doubt that all was for the best in
the best of all possible worlds : they had no
vivid sensibilities nor any tendency to stray from
the normal wa3' of the average, unimaginative
man of the world ; their schooldays were happy ;
they have been obsessed by no doubts ; they
thank God that they have no bees in their bonnets,
and as a thank-offering they write fulsome
panegyrics of their own old schools that make
the lover of truth and the educational idealist
fume with wrath.

Those few, like Mr. G. F. Bradby, who have
seen and readily acknowledged that the Public

x PREFACE

School system is not altogether satisfactory, and
yet are quite sure in their inmost hearts that
reformation must come from within and slowly,
are only too rare.

We have been told frequently since August
1914 that nothing will be the same after the
war as it was before ; that " Literature, Art,
Music, Politics, Education, all are in the melting-
pot ; the iconoclast is at work ; this is the day
of the destroyer ; all rebuilding must remain in
abeyance for the nonce ..." and so on.

It is just this point of view that I most vehem-
ently oppose.

We of the Public Schools were working quietly
long before the war towards a certain definite
goal ; we are still, in adverse circumstances,
struggling to keep our eyes on that same dim
vision, despite the noise of the anarchist ; we
knew perfectly well that we should vindicate
our position in the event of a war ; the point
at issue is, can we still vindicate our position in
the event of a peace ? Complete destruction
and rebuilding would be the ruin of England :
we must proceed on our own lines, gradually
eradicating old tendencies which were in danger
of vitiating and sapping our vitality.

There is something not merely sentimentally
but ineffably precious in the spirit of the Public
Schools which once lost could never be regained ;
it is not merely that all those qualities which
make for success in war are educed, but in the
more troublous days of peace that are coming
there will be a need for just those faculties which

PREFACE ad

seem to be the especial property of men brought
up in this peculiar atmosphere. Our faults are
known to all : an idolatry of physical prowess
to the detriment of the cultivation of the brain,
a lack of imagination, and a blindness to the
beautiful which almost passes belief. These
things, I maintain, can be and are slowly being
remedied. Our good qualities are not so easily
summed up.

My object in publishing these slight sketches
of Public School life before and during the war
is solely to bring home, so far as I can, the point
that though there are many things wrong with
the system, our revolution must be, as we are,
typically English : there must be no cataclysm :
" Here a little, there a little ; precept upon pre-
cept, line upon line " — that is the only way by
which we shall preserve the continuity of a life
that is one of England's greatest assets.

There is some talk at the present time among
short-sighted people who can penetrate no
farther into the future than next month that
Education, after all, matters very little.

It apparently has to be writ large, as I write
it now, and repeated often as I do in this
book, that nothing matters in comparison with
Education.

Our whole object and aim in life is to remodel
it nearer to the heart's desire, so that those
who come after us may benefit from our work.
And those of us who have the modelling, the
shaping of the plastic, malleable clay of the
children's souls are of all God's emissaries the

xii PREFACE

most responsible. If England fails, it is our
fault ; if England leads the world, the praise is
due in no small measure to us.

For verily every man knows in his heart that
it was during his all-important formative years
at school that England really helped or hindered
the emancipation of his entity, the widening of
his outlook, the realisation of his ideals.

S. P. B. MAIS.
January 1916.

CONTENTS

Preface ......

CHAP.

I. The Beginning of a War Term

ix

I

II. The O.T.C

8

lit, Night Operations .

16

IV. A Field Day .

24

V. Chapel ......

34

VI. Hymns ......

41

VII. Sunday ......

51

VIII. Some Societies ....

57

IX. Cribbing .....

67

X. Ragging . .

75

XI. Prefects .....

83

XII. School Magazines

94

XIII. Games .....

104

XIV. The Temporary Master

hi

XV. The Holiday Task

119

XVI. A Gallery of Schoolmasters

124

XVII. Common Room ....

. 144

XVIII. A Masters' Meeting

• 149

XIX. End of Term ....

. 158

A PUBLIC SCHOOL IN
WAR TIME

CHAPTER I

THE BEGINNING OF A WAR TERM

The news from the seat of war was disquieting ;
the casualty lists had been for days appalling ;
our dearest friends, undergraduates of our era,
famous in their all-too-brief day for their deeds
in the football field, in Parliament, in the world
of letters, boys who were in our form but six
months ago, all have poured out the " sweet red
wine of youth," had given all their hopes of
future glory, work, or leisured ease, the serenity
of old age, their hope of immortality on earth, —
sons that might have been, — and here were we
gathered on the platform at Shercombe Magna,
too old, too young, or too decrepit to fight,
going back to preserve the continuity of Winch-
borough traditions, stirred by the example of
our faithful dead to do our little best to keep
England's honour untarnished, her shield of
glory bright.

Talk was on one subject alone — the horror of
the war, the enormous number of old Winch-
burians killed in the last four weeks.

2 THE BEGINNING OF A WAR TERM

We were, perhaps, unduly depressed ; there
seemed to be no prospect of any finish to this
stupendous struggle ; there seemed to be no
possible ulterior motive of good to be gained
from this wanton waste of splendid manhood.
We went to bed tired, dejected, nervous of what
was to come, unable quite to see how we could
keep up the spirit of optimistic endeavour and
high ideals among our boys while our own hearts
and minds were so obsessed by the black terror
of it all.

Sleepless, we tossed and worried through the
night till merciful drowsiness overtook us and
we were swept into the fairyland of dreams,
where life's hideous realities of bloodshed and
desecration have no place.

I was awakened by the singing of a million
birds — dawn was just breaking over the wooded
hills. A glow of heartfelt thankfulness filled
my being ; jumping out of bed, I hurried to the
window and gazed out over the peaceful scene.

All the weariness of last night seemed to have
vanished : surely these tiny messengers carolling
at heaven's gate could be none other than the
liberated souls of my dead friends, whose dust,
now mingled with the Flanders soil, would in the
future ages cause to spring up a richer race, in
whose blood should flow something of that
English joyousness of heart, that English laughter,
that English endurance, courage, self-sacrifice,
and milk of human kindness which have made
us for ever famous in the annals of the world's
history.

THE FIRST MORNING 3

What need for sadness, for retrospective gloom,
for dread of things to come ?

With a sigh I turned and . . . slept like any
11 two-years' child."

The sun was pouring into my room when
next I woke. A busy day was in store for me.

Assembled in chapel I saw the hundreds of faces
I have so grown to love, all fresh with the im-
perishable glow of youth, all imbued with the
God-given gifts of health and determination.
We rose, and in a moment the rafters of the old
oak beams rang again with the refrain, " New
every morning is the love " ; prayers were
offered up for those " who by sickness or wounds
shall be called away to the bosom of God,"
and we troop out to be welcomed formally as
a whole, and informally as individuals, in Big
School.

Questions of routine are settled in the masters'
meeting ; we hear that the Bishop of South-
bourne is to preach on Speech Day, but that,
" in the light of recent events, all the usual
concomitant festivities will, of course, be
abandoned " ; promotions are arranged ; set-
lists distributed ; and ... I find myself in
form, beginning thus : " It would be impossible
for me to begin in any other way than to spend
this morning in giving you the life-history and
extracts from the glorious achievements of that
patriot-poet of whom you have all heard some-
thing, and of whose poems I have in the past
so constantly read selections to you : I mean,
of course, Rupert Brooke, who died on St.

2

4 THE BEGINNING OF A WAR TERM

George's Day, on Shakespeare's Day, in the
Dardanelles, having offered up, not in vain, all
his most precious and rare gifts to the service
of that country who bestowed them so lavishly
on him. ' What have I done for thee, England,
my own ? ' I will try shortly to show you."

For an hour and more those boys listened
rapt to my faltering, poor efforts to reconstruct
the life and work of one of our rarest spirits —
boys who a year ago might have looked askance
on poetry as " all rot " and eyed with suspicion
any master who should try to foist on them his
own life-passion of poetry. Now they have
learnt through tribulation the solace, the up-
lifting inspiration that comes from that divine
outpouring of the soul which we call poetry.

Were nothing else needed to prove the extra-
ordinary, almost unbelievable renaissance that
has come about in our public schools since and
through the war this hour's lecture on the
Shelley of our days and its effect would show
the inerasable impression on and the heightened
ideals of the boy of 1915.

Now that we may have so short a time to live
we no longer can afford to disregard the beauty
of cloud and sunset, the budding leaves on
the trees, the sheer, exquisite, aesthetic delight
wrought in us by the old buildings and cloisters
in the school close.

Coming out of school into the hot sunshine of
the quadrangle it is almost with a sob of un-
realisable joy that we look on the old familiar
faces, human yet divine, the age-old latticed

THE BEAUTY OF IT 5

windows of the schoolhouse studies, flanked by
the flying buttresses of the majestic abbey on
either side behind, the elms and yews on the
masters' courts, the Tudor gateway, and the
beds of myriad-coloured flowers. The scent of
sweet-briar sends us in thought back to days
of peace spent in shady nooks overhung with
lilac and laburnum ; we almost smell again
the jasmine on the wall ; in a moment and
we are diving into the sweet, deep pool of
" Bunter's Bay," made even more a thing of
beauty and a joy for ever by the sight of boy-
hood, innocent, godlike, frisking on the sides,
leaping salmon-like from the pure delight of
living, about the cool, pellucid waters.

The summer term once again. Clad in white
flannels, ever young, ringing with happy laughter,
boys crowd down to nets, and cricket has
begun.

Slowly, as if half reluctant to spoil the careless
merriment of a single day, come the shades of
evening, and the angelus rings in the convent
school beyond the fields. Darkness descends, and
a stiller beauty, transcending even the glories
of the day, takes hold of our hearts ; the study
windows lighted, the dark forms of boys searching
for their books, settling down to work, can
be seen. As I go home I pass the many windows
of the labourers' cottages, with the lamps flicker-
ing on the table or the firelight just casting a
transitory gleam on some girl's hair. " Home " !
how much more does that word mean now than
ever in the past to all of us ! My gate clicks,

6 THE BEGINNING OF A WAR TERM

the dogs hear me and, tumbling over one
another, come forward eagerly to greet me ;
this is like old times ; term has begun again.
In my study, surrounded by my own tattered,
precious books, I prepare my work for to-
morrow, when we set to work in earnest. How
to keep my boys alive to the high service
whereto they are called ? I know : to-morrow
I will give them to learn by heart so that they
may treasure it in the " secret 'st " recesses of
their souls that epitaph I read them to-day.
Surely the example of a noble man will go
further not only to preserve the sacred spark,
but to fan it so that it will become an all-devour-
ing flame of devoted service, than all the teaching
in the world.

" If I should die, think only this of me :
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed :
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives back somewhere the thoughts by England given ;
Her sights and sounds ; dreams, happy as her day ;
And laughter, learnt of friends ; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven."

With lighter heart I close the books and go to
bed. With inspirations such as this who could
fail to touch the hearts of boys and lead them
on to thoughts of highest things, and deeds that

THE SCHOOLMASTER'S INFLUENCE 7

will make the name of England ring down the
ages as something ineffably precious ? After
the happy warrior, the schoolmaster of to-day
is by far the most to be envied of those who
mould and influence the nation of the future.
Let us see to it that we fail not at our post ; our
advantages are indeed great, and so in proportion
are our responsibilities. The summer term is
here ; let us make the most of it ; with eyes
uplifted and shoulders braced we go forth to
meet the unknown. Let it never be said of us
in after years that we failed our country just
when she needed us most, but rather let us
strive so that Englishmen of the ages to come
shall look back on us and say, " Here and here
did England help me : how can I help England ? "
This, and this pre-eminently, is the spirit that
we are born to breed.

CHAPTER II

THE O.T.C.

In the old days the O.T.C. meant one thing
only : Camp. All the drudgery of company drills
and battalion parades, all the weary afternoons
spent in route marches and on the range, were
only endured as part of the agony which had to
be gone through before we earned the reward
of the long-looked-for annual camp at Tidworth,
Rugeley, or Aldershot, about which we rhapso-
dised before and were ecstatic on our return
home.

Scarcely any of us except the ultra-keen ever
took the corps seriously. For a moment, on
looking at our commissions, signed by George
R.I. himself, we had an inkling of the meaning
of it all ; there were, too, some masters who
spent their hard-earned holidays training in
barracks or attending the autumn manoeuvres —
but these were looked upon askance as cranks.

The majority of us looked on the corps as " a
bally sweat," " piffling waste of time," " playing
at soldiers," and so on according as the mood
took us. We were rather inclined to grudge
the valuable hours when we might have been
finishing an all-important house-match to a

IN DAYS GONE BY 9

lecture on extended order or outposts or to a
rehearsal of a ceremonial march past.

Frankly speaking, most of us looked upon the
day on which the weekly parade took place as
the most boring, the most to be dreaded of all ;
somehow the bath after drill was never quite the
exhilarating pick-me-up that it used to be after
a really hot game ; consequently, we went into
school after it slightly depressed, ready to be
irritable at trifles, not at all in the humour either
to teach or to be taught. The many masters
and the few boys not in the corps " groused "
because their afternoon was spoilt by the rest
of us who were not obtainable for " footer " or
cricket. Those of us who had been on parade
invariabry found food for adverse comment on
the manner in which the O.C. had carried out
his scheme, or were thoroughly angry because we
had been dismissed at least five minutes later
than usual.

True enough, we had our lapses into keenness ;
after a high dignitary from the War Office had
lectured us severely on our shortcomings or
implored us to join the all-too-insufficient (in
numbers) Special Reserve, or just before or after
the big Terminal Field Day with Marlborough,
Cheltenham, and Rugby, we were full of energy.
But more commonly the summit of our am-
bitions was realised if we could manage to be
last on to parade and first off.

Camp, however, made up for it all : it was a
holiday with all our dearest friends accessible,
sharing it with us ; it was a colossal picnic, a

io THE O.T.C.

throw-back to pre-civilisation days, a time when
any kind of food was seized upon as if we were
on a desert island, a place where no school
bell was for ever ringing us from classroom to
classroom, where one rose before the lark and
was asleep before it too, where mimic warfare
was practised daily as if it were the real thing,
where so many Regular soldiers helped us to play
the game that we almost felt ourselves to be
Regulars too ; where in the evening-time we
met and M hobnobbed " with all the other public
schools of whom we had heard so much, but
knew so little, at those never-to-be-forgotten
"sing-songs" where camaraderie prevails
almost in perfection. One would scarcely dare
to say how many of our lifelong friendships have
begun, been cemented, and kept flourishing by
the Public School Camps.

It was in the midst of one of these great social
gatherings that the bomb of war burst. Much
time has passed since then. What of the O.T.C.
of to-day ? It is certainly no stretch of the im-
agination to say that the corps is the one thing
that matters just now at the public schools. At
a bound, on the instant, it came into its own.

Every member of Common Room who could
went out to fight in the real Army ; those who
could not have come in to help the Army in the
making.

We parade daily instead of weekly, sometimes
even twice in the day. There are schools whose
members live in khaki both in term-time and the
holidays, but these are the exception. With the

VOLUNTARY BUT STRENUOUS u

coming of the holidays, unless we go to train
Kitchener's Third Line, we doff our uniforms and
appear shamefaced as civilians, some with the gilt-
letters O.T.C. in their button-holes, the majority
simply in mufti as a relief from the term. For
term-time is really strenuous these days : it is
not to be supposed that our work has deteriorated,
our games been neglected, — rather have they
both improved, — it is simply that we have had
to find room for this new all-important occupa-
tion, that of soldiering.

We do not need compulsory measures to make
our boys keen ; compulsion would probably act
as a deterrent. The corps is as voluntary a
society as ever — but everybody belongs to it,
to his eternal honour.

In old days any excuse to get off parade was
seized, but now the boy who wishes to escape a
drill is not to be found ; the trouble is rather
to keep him back when he has a severe attack
of influenza from taking part in night operations
when it is snowing, or a biting east wind threatens
to penetrate the most military of greatcoats.
Everything is now done with precision and finesse ;
the tactics to be employed on a field scheme
are discussed openly throughout the school long
before the exercise takes place, and what ought
and ought not to have been done for weeks
after by even the smaller fry. You may see a
house captain taking his team on to the field in
a final house match with a sangfroid that you
cannot but envy ; the next day, perhaps, you
will see the same boy, entrusted with a delicate

12 THE O.T.C.

piece of military strategy to work out in practice,
absolutely shivering with funk. To such a pass
does unbridled enthusiasm bring us.

A new alternative has been introduced for
those who are useless at cricket or physically
unfit to play football. These now form squads
of Morse signallers, and they can be seen on
all the high points of vantage in the country
surrounding the school valiantly " flag-wagging "
from their stations. Semaphore signalling, of
course, is learnt by every boy in the school, but
Morse makes too great an inroad into our all-too-
scanty hours of leisure to be successfully practised
throughout the corps.

Distance-judging, scouting, map-reading and
map-drawing, bridge-building, miniature-range
firing, band practices, extra drills for individual
houses — innumerable side-issues of our corps
life occupy all the odd half-hours which used to
be sacred to detention, swimming, choir practice,
" punt-about," and " nets." With all this
special training it is not to be wondered at that
we treat our weekly battalion drill as an occasion
for extra smartness ; the least mistake on our
part makes us grind our teeth with anger and
feel glaring idiots where in the past we should
have dismissed the error with a careless laugh.
But our greatest efforts are reserved for those
splendid occasions when we are included in
divisional manoeuvres or take part in night
operations : these latter in particular stimulating
the imagination, for it is hard for the least
sensitive of us to fail to feel the eerie influence

NIGHT OPERATIONS 13

of the dark . Every bush or tree trunk becomes a
real live enemy, every cry of bird or rustle in the
trees is only too easilymistaken for the whispering
of a hostile force or the creeping of the foe in the
undergrowth.

We have learnt more than we ever thought
possible of Nature and her ways from these
nocturnal expeditions ; we have learnt how far
noise carries on a windless evening ; we have
learnt something of the protective colouring
of plant and ground to keep our position hidden
from the enemy ; we have discovered the de-
ceptive properties of water and hillock, valley
and green plateau, when we are endeavouring
to estimate distances to the nearest ten yards ;
we have learnt how easy it is for a great number
of men to hide themselves from observation
within a few yards of those searching for them
if only they keep low and preserve absolute
silence ; to our astonishment we have found,
to our cost sometimes, that it is just as possible
to ride right over men in furze bushes without
dislodging them as it is not to rouse hares or
grouse when we are beating for them.

We are learning slowly how to outwit a cordon
when we have to break through a line on a
moonless night, just as, when it is our turn to
form the cordon, we are discovering how to
post our men to the best possible advantage
so that casual scouts shall not penetrate our
outposts. I have seen it urged somewhere that
all this sudden renascence of interest in military
strategy and tactics is bad for boys ; that the

14 THE O.T.C.

outcome of it will be a love of militarism, which
is just what we are striving with so great a
sacrifice and cost of men and money to eradicate
from the world. But from what I have seen
as an officer in the O.T.C. my impression is that
bloodshed and war are absolutely repugnant to
the boy-mind ; he is keen, keener than he ever
was, to join the Army and to do his bit, but he
is no lover of war for its own sake. It is one
thing to be an ardent signaller or bugler, and
quite another to want to kill a fellow-creature ;
it is one thing to play a sort of hide-and-seek
in the dark on a wintry night in a blizzard, but
quite another to want to kill your antagonist if
he falls into your hands.

As a preparative for future service in the field
the O.T.C. is of vast importance, but if all war
were, by the mercy of God, to be abolished to-
morrow the O.T.C. would still have its uses for
the young citizen who will afterwards control
and sway his fellow-men. It cultivates the
powers of endurance, it teaches the use of
absolute discipline, it generates the ability to
command bodies of men, it breeds self-reliance
and quick initiative in moments of crisis, it
fosters an understanding, and consequently a
love of Nature in all her wayward moods and
caprices, it keeps boys out of doors in all sorts
of weather when they might be mooning about
in their houses, it prevents games from being
exalted to an unwarrantably high place in the
school curriculum, as it also prevents them from
being played day in, day out, ad nauseam , so

VALUE OF THE O.T.C. 15

that a boy has nothing else to think about —
no other interest in life — but the propelling of a
ball or the correct attitude or stance to adopt
when he goes in to bat ; it is a safety-valve
for the feelings, an added interest for those who
are tired of work or unlucky in the games.

Those who continually praise the public school
system for the splendid qualities which it en-
genders, and admire without stinting the average
product which it produces, have been apt in
the past to underestimate or neglect altogether
the part which the O.T.C. takes in the forming
of the altogether praiseworthy characteristics
which they hold up to honour. It is to be hoped
that future historians will be careful to pay
honour where honour is due, and not omit to
make mention of the never-sufficiently-to-be-
praised Training Corps, which at present is
showing to all the world of what stuff public
school boys are made, and how the name of
Englishman is not likely to be besmirched in one
year or two by those who are now about to go
out into the world and stand in the limelight
of the arena of life — be it political, martial, or
philosophical.

CHAPTER III

NIGHT OPERATIONS

We of the public schools have gone mad over a
new craze. In the slack years of peace we fell a
victim in the dim ages to diabolo, then a little
later to model aeroplane building ; more recently
the cult of the motor bicycle ousted flying from
its prior place of honour, and conversations ran
interminably on " makes " and carburettors, two-
strokes, and sparking plugs. The old days of
stamp- and egg-collecting gave place to the album
of motor number-plates and " bonnet " designs.
These in their turn have now been discarded
for something definitely military ; after becoming
keen on mere ceremonial parades, a colossal
effort of the imagination, we have again been
bitten with the craze-germ ; this time it is for
night operations.

Field days nowadays are sufficiently excit-
ing, but they fade into pale insignificance when
compared with any of our tactical exercises
in the dark. Our initiation into night work was
such an overpowering success that we have been
restive ever since.

It was on a bitter night in late November that
twenty of the senior N.C.O.'s and men under

16

GETTING INTO POSITION 17

the CO. gaily marched away from the town over
the desolate moor to tea at a farmhouse un-
known to the rest of the school ; after their meal
they were to attempt to cut through a cordon,
drawn by sixty of the remainder of the corps
under four officers, stretching over four miles of
country. On this occasion I was in defence.
At 6.30 I led my fourteen men, singing merrily,
through the streets until we reached the darkness
of the open country. We then, in silence, broke
into the double across the fields in order to get
quickly into our position. I said in silence, but
the coughing and wheezing, the clinking of
buttons and rifles, and the swish of the feet
through the grass would, for the first five minutes,
have led an enemy to believe that a battalion at
least was on the march.

After stumbling over every tussock and grumb-
ling under their breath at the darkness for about
four hundred yards, my party gradually became
more seasoned to their work, so that by the
time they were in a possible danger zone they
were creeping by hedgerows with the stealth
of polecats. They could even cross the hard,
frozen roads on the sides of their soles without a
noticeable clatter. Coughs and heavy breathing
had marvellously vanished, and it was impossible
to distinguish the men's approach farther away
than fifteen yards, although they were wearing
white hat-bands.

Having placed each patrol on his beat, I did
some private scouting alone, first by trying to
get into touch with the party on my left, who

1 8 NIGHT OPERATIONS

had unwittingly left a gap between us of three-
quarters of a mile, which luckily the enemy did
not discover ; then I dodged in and out trying
to evade the vigilance of my own scouts, every
time in vain. I found them holding up carts,
bicycles, motors, wandering Yeomanry with
their sweethearts, old men, women, and
children, for the pure joy of seeing how they
jumped.

For two hours in the biting wind and frozen
lanes they kept guard, never for a moment relax-
ing the efforts, frenziedly excited the whole time,
imagining " every bush to be a bear " and every
rustle in the trees or brushwood to signal the
advent of the enemy. But we had no luck ;
at 9.15 three rockets signalled the conclusion
of the experiment, and no one had dared to cross
our paths. On the return march news was
brought of the capture of three out of the four
groups that had tried to force a passage ; each
of my men was ready to swear that the fourth
did not penetrate his beat.

A few days afterwards it was our turn to try to
get through the line. Of course, it was a much
lighter night ; we were certain of that. All the
way along on our outward march in the interval
of songs you would hear such remarks as " Good
gracious ! look at the moon ; we shall be spotted
half a mile away ; we haven't an earthly ; the
Major would choose an easy night like this to
get his own back ..." and so on. We thought
of all the excuses that could be made for our
failure, which we all talked about as inevitable,

THE ATTACK 19

and yet had privately decided in our own minds
that so far as in us lay we at least should not fail .

After a march of some three miles we were
halted and given our orders. This time I was
on the extreme left in command of eight men,
waiting like hounds in leash for leave to begin.
When the signal came we dashed off across three
open fields to the shelter of a large quarry, from
which I had decided to start. Immediately in
front lay a dangerous lane extending right across
our whole front, which I felt sure the enemy would
be guarding. It was pure folly to make for
gates or openings, so we crawled through the wet
stubble to a place where the hedge seemed to be
thin, but where no obvious gap could be discerned,
and on a given command made a rush for it,
tumbled into the lane, and dived into the under-
growth on the farther side. Here we sustained
our first casualty ; one of my senior men, in
jumping, broke his glasses and strained a muscle,
which naturally impeded our progress, but so
elated were we at getting past so difficult a place
that we forgot all minor troubles, and rested for a
moment, panting, but joyful, in the dark red loam
of a freshly turned ploughed field. Our scouts
went ahead to scour the next hedge, reported all
clear, and we crept silently to it ; then with
another rush, slightly less frenzied than the
last, we dropped on the farther side, and anxiously
waited for some sign of a roused enemy. All,
however, was quiet, so we pursued our course.

This next field was of enormous extent in
every direction ; by keeping rigidly to the
3

20 NIGHT OPERATIONS

middle we thought that we should escape the
snares and attention of any watches on either
flank ; but when we were half-way across we
suddenly dropped flat on our stomachs at the
sound of approaching voices. Far away it is
true they were ; it seemed on a distant road ;
but it was enough to make us creep on all fours
for a hundred yards or more, until at length we
were within fifty yards of our next hedge. I
then, as scout, crept forward to search for the
enemy, and wishing to ascertain where they were
before we smashed another hedge, I crept towards
a large gap, where I felt certain one at least
would be. I was some twenty yards away when
a hatless, overcoated creature sauntered casually
past the opening with the full glare of the town
lights behind him in the distance. In the heat
of the moment, so angry was I to think that he
should thus expose himself, and at the same time
have taken off his hat, which, bound with white,
was the sign of hostility, that I quietly remarked,
without thinking, M Come along, sonny, put those
hands up," to which, when he recovered, he
replied, "I'm afraid you're dead ; I've got my
men covering you." " All your men are covered
equally well by mine behind me," I retorted.
But argument leads nowhere and wastes time.
I gave myself up as prisoner, and as a com-
promise one of my uninjured men was allowed
to penetrate this line unmolested. It turned
out to be the only line. How bitterly I blamed,
as I sat there, my idle curiosity ; how safe and
near home we should have been had I been

CAPTURED 21

content to go on breaking hedges and rushing
through .

I was furious at the unfairness of the enemy
in removing their white hats, which would have
been visible for many hundred yards, and, cold
and angry, I begged leave to be allowed to return
home. Getting colder and angrier I revolved
in my mind over and over again what I should
have done ; I ought to have given a great shout
when I was captured to warn my men to scatter,
as I had said in my first instructions ; I ought
not to have given away the fact that I was
accompanied at all ; I ought to have crept back
silently to my own body and worked out a passage
through the hedge as far as possible away from
this sentry group ; a thousand alternatives
flitted across my mind as the town lights became
clearer and my way less muddy. I regretted
again my folly until I had worked myself up into
a sort of minor paroxysm which was only relieved
by a humorous accident.

On my wajr, looking for more of the enemy for
amusement to while away the drear y walk home,
I heard noises on the farther side of a hedge up
which I was creeping ; noiselessly I drew nearer,
and then to revenge myself for myearlier humilia-
tion I jumped out on them with the remark,
M Good gracious ! you're the right sort to guard
a line of defence ; I could hear you a mile away ;
just try to keep a bit quieter . . . oh, Heavens !
Sorry ... I thought ..." I had unwittingly
surprised a pair of nocturnal lovers, a con-
valescent soldier and his girl, frightening the lass

22 NIGHT OPERATIONS

nearly out of her life, and making even the
man forget to swear. That incident did more
to repair my lost temper and bring me to my
senses than anything. When I arrived at the
armoury to report myself I found that I had
scarcely a " grouse " left about the wearing of
white hats. I was captured, dead, longing for a
hot meal, a boiling bath, and a long sleep.

The next day I heard to my delight that all
the other groups of our party, except two of
mine who came quietly along the high road
unmolested, had also been captured by patrols
without headgear. Much bitter discussion had
arisen therefrom, which was washed out and
forgotten the next day in an afternoon attack
in the drenching rain on the local Yeomanry,
who supplied fresh fuel for the feud incident
even to peace campaigns. The desperate
stealth of the scouts and screen as they crept
through the castle woods, vainly endeavouring
to prevent their approach from startling the
pheasants, rabbits, and rooks, made them
completely forget the ignominy of the night
before.

So it is with all our military strategy this
term. We no sooner lose our tempers, cry
out with shame at defeat, or gloat over victories
than the next day we are given a chance to
readjust the balance by proving ourselves
tacticians where yesterday we had been fools,
and fools where last time we had displayed real
acuteness. All the time we cannot help feeling
thankful that we are learning all this peacefully

SOME LESSONS 23

instead of suffering death or shame after every
mistake ; we suffer quite enough even playing
at it as we do from the jeers of our fellows not
to repeat an error, and for that alone, if for
no other reason, we are learning an enormous
amount that we failed to know before. We are
keen ; we are beginning to understand that the
country is not the open book to us which we
thought it to be ; we are realising that it is easy
enough to understand the regulations and ideas
which we read in " Infantry Training," but a
very different thing to put them into practice ;
that the half has not been told us of the intricacies
or the charms of night work ; that, instead of a
meagre chapter of instructions, there ought to be
a special volume devoted to what has become
with us, as I said at the beginning of this chapter,
a passion and a craze.

CHAPTER IV
A FIELD DAY

Nothing could be more different from the
spirit shown towards a field day in November
191 3 than that which animates the schoolboy
of to-day.

Then the whole show was looked upon as a
colossal " rag," a heaven-sent opportunity to
get away from routine and have a real slack
time ; no one cared in the least as to the objective
or the point of the scheme — that was a business
for the officers to settle amongst themselves ;
they were equally unconcerned whether a grim
umpire announced that they had been heavily
defeated or had won a sweeping victory. All
they thought of during his discourse was tea.

But nowadays when a tactical scheme is sug-
gested for a certain day you will see the O.T.C.
board besieged hourly by myriads of keen
soldiers-in-embryo anxious to learn what the
fate of their platoon is to be. "I hope to
Heaven that we're not in reserve " ; " Have you
heard that Malchester, Cliffborough, Upton, and
Harbury are all to be on our side? " " Sloppy
told me yesterday that all the ground we're
fighting over is inches deep in water " 5 u Yes,

THE GREAT DAY DAWNS 25

and there are three great streams, ten feet
across and three deep, with no bridges ..."
and so on.

Rumour runs rife as to the number of rounds
of blank that is likely to be issued ; lights may-
be seen late at night in various classrooms where
keen N.C.O.'s have obtained their form-master's
permission to M jelly-graph " contour maps for
their sections ; shops are crowded the night
before these great days with boys securing
provender to supplement the rations which they
suspect will be insufficient.

At last the morning of the fight comes. Fags,
who have no trade union to protect them, are
" hoicked " out of bed as soon as it is light
to put a final polish on their seniors' buttons,
to fill the water-bottles, to clean the puttees and
boots. .Somehow it takes about three times as
long as usual to dress on these occasions, and
a frantic haste only results in just scrambling
on to parade when the O.C. has reached a
critical point in his long detailed description of
the day's programme.

At last, after a decalogue of " dont's " with
regard to the throwing of personnel from the
carriage windows, we march off to the station
amid a fanfare of trumpets, cheers from the
townspeople on their way to business, and
counter-cheers from the errand-boys and school-
children on their way to school.

We line up on the platform, the special glides
slowly in, the bugle sounds the " Entrain," and
helter-skelter the whole six hundred make for

26 A FIELD DAY

the corner seats immediately facing them.
Broken windows are avoided by a miracle ; the
train starts : immediately volley on volley of
wild raucous cheering on the part of the
corps re-echoes through the station and the
woods behind, and we are on our way to the
rendezvous.

The officers snatch a glance at the news and
take their only chance of a pipe until evening
comes ; all too soon the train draws up at a
siding and the bugle rings out the permission to
detrain, and we are again in a twinkling all lined
up ready for our long march to the battlefield.

Tongues are loosened, sections of fours wax
more friendly than they are wont to be in the
constraint of school, and talk of a really intimate
nature ensues until the talkers find themselves
deafened by the noise of music-hall ditties and
hymns whistled, sung, and played on divers
instruments all round them.

For a few moments they bawl at the tops of
their voices, only to continue their conversation
in a lull as if there had been no break.

Some few, oblivious of the beauty of the
lanes through which they are passing, of the
discordant yells on every side of them, placidly
read on in their favourite book, — The Thirty-
Nine Steps, or Edgar Allen Poe, for instance, —
lost to all sense of the present, rhythmically but
unconsciously keeping step .

After some five miles of this, the column is
halted, made to pile arms, and allowed to fall
out for an hour. Some continue to read, some

FIRST ERRORS 27

settle down to a game of chess, others go to
sleep ; one crowd goes off to rob an orchard in
a body, and returns with haversacks, pockets,
pouches, and hats crammed to overflowing with
cider apples, which they proceed to devour apace
before questions are asked.

A distant tramping is heard, and suddenly
interest is revived — here comes Malchester, one
of our great allies, swinging down the road.

Every one is thinking the same thing : " How
much bigger and smarter these fellows look than
we do ! " We fear and admire them. That they
are probably thinking much the same about us
does not cross our minds.

Lunch rations are then served out, and silence
reigns while well-nigh a thousand boys attempt
each of them to cope with two great hunks
of ham sandwiched between four vast layers of
bread, one banana, and two Bath buns.

Scarcely are the last remnants out of sight
than we start to discover the enemy.

We are in wooded enclosed country, but by
aid of the maps we think that we know our way.
It is only after an hour's ploughing over wet
grass and stubble that we find that we have
been facing due south for three miles when we
were trying to go west.

Curses are launched against the officer in
charge of the advanced guard, and the column
changes direction at last after having delayed
the action for the best part of the morning.

By devious routes, through hedge and brier,
through farmyards the scent of which cries

28 A FIELD DAY

aloud to the heavens, through orchards laden
with apples green and apples red, apples yellow
and apples brown, the companies wind their
way ; at length the noise of firing on our left
shows that our left flank guard have got into
touch with the enemy's scouts. The column is
halted and the preordained dispositions are
made. No. i platoon goes south to seize Marsh-
barn Farm and make good the only foot bridge
across the river of which we have heard so much,
No. 2 platoon hurries still farther south to try
to get round the enemy's right flank, Harbury
takes the main road to the north, and the re-
mainder of us (the main column) remain in our
breaches until such time as scouts bring back
news that our way is clear to make a main attack
upon some particularly weak spot.

It is hard indeed to remain sitting in the side
of a hedge, consoled only by blackberries and
apples, while all the luckier platoons are firing
heavily with rifles and " rattles " (machine-guns)
within four hundred yards.

One subaltern privately dispatches a scout
imploring the commander of No. 2 platoon to
send back an urgent message for help : he sees
no chance of being in at the death otherwise.
But it is not to be.

The Harbury leader sends back a note to the
effect that he is clearing the road and that it is
a good one.

The Major immediately decides to convey his
whole force this way and force a passage into
the village which it is his aim to destroy. He

FIRST BLOOD 29

selects the young subaltern to take his platoon
in front. This officer is not slow to avail himself
of the opportunity to leave the reserve. He
dashes down the road at breakneck speed,
makes good the bridge over the river, and feels
his way for the high stone bridge over the rail-
way which commands the village. In his anxiety
to get some fighting he invents a bogus message
to the effect that the bridge must be rushed at
all costs, and, taking advantage of a passing
train, hustles his platoon up on to the bridge
only to find that his u point," cowed by the
sight of a platoon of the enemy immediately in
front of them, sink on to the asphalt and open
fire. In vain he implores his men to come on :
they stop and open fire ... an umpire drops
out of heaven and caustically tells him that his
men are for ten minutes annihilated ; that, had
he gone on and rushed the enemy he would have
allowed him the bridge, but that as he stopped
the victory rested with the other side. Deeply
chagrined, the subaltern turns his men about
and retreats. Meeting a friend of his in com-
mand of the next platoon some two hundred
yards back, he advises him to rush the bridge
while the enemy are thinking over their victory.
In a few seconds he hears a mighty cheer and
has the doubtful satisfaction of seeing his
friend do what he failed to do, and clear the
bridge .

His ten minutes having elapsed, he returns to
the bridge to find that the enemy have taken
up a strong position behind a hedge, holding the

3o A FIELD DAY

village some three hundred yards ahead. Not
again is he going to hesitate. Section by section
he gets his men into the field and amasses by
degrees about five hundred others ; these he
sends up by half-platoon rushes ten yards at a
time, nearer and ever nearer to the hedge ; his
blood boiling within him, the cries of the opposing
commander, " Give it 'em, lads; shove it into
'em now, boys," only makes him the more
bloody-minded.

At last he has got to within thirty yards of
them, and with one blast of his whistle leads
the whole force in one great overwhelming
charge. Breaking through the hedge he lands
fair and square on the shoulders of one of his
opponents, and for five seconds a hand-to-hand
fight ensues. Suddenly the umpire again turns
up from nowhere and calls out the subaltern,
and this time awards him the victory at the
cost , as he says , of great loss of life . Five minutes '
respite is to be allowed while the enemy retreat.
The subaltern goes through each platoon and
finds a man missing here, a rifle there, a hat
somewhere, a bayonet somewhere else : he rests
his men while these are searched for and wipes
his overheated brow.

His force is now well in the village and the
road is blocked with sight-seers and photo-
graphers. The bugle to " Continue "sounds, and
for the last time he leads his men away up the
narrow village street. A peep through the
dense laurels on his left gives him a glimpse
of the Hall park, where he detects the enemy

STREET FIGHTING 31

opening out in extended order to their final
position. He details his friend's platoon to open
up a frontal attack while he tries to enfilade
them on their left flank : the corner of the
market-place is held by the enemy : once more
he urges his platoon to a mighty effort, and
literally gallops at their head to seize this
position : the enemy, taken unprepared, hold
on a second too late : he dashes into the middle
of them and takes a whole platoon captive,
and then opens fire on the remainder, whose
left flank is now unprotected. Almost immedi-
ately the " Cease fire " goes, and he lies in the
middle of the road absolutely exhausted, well
content that he has retrieved his honour.

Two yokels standing near him exchange
impressions :

" Ay, it were fine to watch them lads ; 'twer'
joost like one of them cinema picters." " That
wer'reel faightin', that wer', watchin' 'em break
through them laurel bushes and knockin' of
each other down like. Eh ! A wish oor Jim 'd
bin 'ere to a' seed 'em : 'e alius laiked fist
work did oor Jim. Such little lads too. By
Goom, to zee 'em run with their guns out like
that there ; it wer' a fair treat, that's wot it
wer'."

Now the various companies begin to assemble
from all parts of the park to hear the " pow-pow."
Singing in the far distance betrays the fact
that some platoons are still on the way to join
us. At length all are gathered. The leaders
of each side concisely, map in hand, declaim

32 A FIELD DAY

their dispositions, and the umpire starts his
harangue .

He is the Adjutant of the Third Castershires,
invalided home and doing his level best to
maintain the high traditions of his regiment by
bringing into it all those public schoolboy cadets
whom he picks out on these field days as
promising.

To-day he is as caustic in his adverse judg-
ments, as sparing in his praises, as you would
have a first-rate and keen officer to be.

He retells the story of the taking of the bridge,
for instructional purposes ; he causes a thrill
of joy to run through the veins of the Winch-
borough contingent when he says that he had
rarely seen a prettier piece of work than their
attack across the field and in the village ; he
begs those who are soon to be leaving to consider
the claims which his regiment has upon them ;
and, thanking them in the name of the country
for the work which the O.T.C. were doing,
he ceases as abruptly as he began.

Every boy seemed to hang upon every word :
even when he dilated on the work of the platoons
which were outside the main action, one having
to fight a rearguard action all the way home
owing to a mistaken direction, he kept the
interest of the entire mass awake : for the truth
is that in these days boys want to know ; they
are only too anxious to learn whatever can be
learnt under peace conditions.

Amid the cheers of the villagers every one
then marches off to the tea rendezvous and thence

SOME RESULTS 33

to the station, which again re-echoes to the
cheers of the various schools seeing each other
off.

Arrived once more at home, with band playing
the " Carmen " we swing up the busy streets
and into the lime-tree courts of the school.
A word from the O.C. :

M I can remember no better field day. Winch-
borough is certainly not ashamed of her present
generation. Food and baths await you : I will
keep you no longer. Dismiss."

The next morning, in Common Room, the
O.C. speaks :

" I hear about half the corps have written to
the umpire to ask him to reserve for them a
commission in his regiment. In our amateur
way I suppose after all we do some good. We
don't get much of the honour and glory, but I
suppose this is our proper sphere. I wish I
was always as certain of that as I am to-day."

CHAPTER V
CHAPEL

One of the greatest troubles that besets the
mind of the conscientious schoolmaster is the
incessant questioning of his inner being as to
whether he is doing his utmost for the future
welfare of the youth of the nation. Would
he not have a stronger hold over boys if he
became ordained ? Would not the definite
doctrinal standpoint that is the sine qua non
of the man who takes Holy Orders be of the
greatest use to him in tackling the many serious
but secret problems of public school life ?

Every young man has, I take it, had qualms
at one time or another about this. I know
no more perplexing subject among the many
intricate worries that form part of our daily
life.

The first and fundamental object of the
clergyman is to preach the Gospel, to throw light
upon the essential features of the Christian
religion, and to bring home as forcibly as he
can the necessity of it in every boy's mind. If
England is to continue to be the great nation
she has become she must be definitely Christian
in her outlook ; if her youth neglect the tenets

34

QUALMS 35

of the doctrines held by this religion then the
decay of the country is imminent.

But there immediately crowd upon the mind
myriad upsetting theories. Am I the type of
man to confine myself within the narrow bounds
of the Thirty-Nine Articles? Can I justifiably
don the garb of the minister ? Do I feel that
absolute call to preach without which no man
can claim inspiration or the right to preach?
The pulpit is not merely a platform from which I
may "spout " my ideals : it is the place from which
I am to interpret and comment on God's Word.
My whole life is spent in propagating a sort of
gospel : in my classroom, on the playing-fields,
everywhere I stand as an example. My in-
fluence is paramount : am I not already exerting
it to the greatest advantage ? What further
could I do if I underwent a course at a theological
college and finally vowed to spread the accepted
dogma as a parson ?

Chapel as it now exists is unsatisfactory. At
some schools form-masters have to take a sort
of roll-call during the service ; they have to tick
off the names of those present during hymn or
prayer, psalm or sermon.

If they are absent they have to arrange for a
deputy to act for them. This rankles in the
hearts of not a few, who look on a chapel service
as a time set apart for public worship and private
devotion.

They notice with deep apprehension the list-
lessness on the part of the boys in the presence
of the uplifting words of collects and lessons,
4

36 CHAPEL

the bored somnolence during sermons, and the
lack of appreciation during the recital of noble
psalms or emotional hymns. Such a state of
things at all costs, they feel, should cease to be.

Only one remedy presents itself to them, and
that a drastic one. Why not make chapel-
going voluntary ?

Again and again we hear from parents and old
boys the same story: "Oh! I never go to
church now ; I got ' fed up ' with it at school :
to have to attend fifteen services a week whether
I would or not put me off for ever afterwards."

It seems to me that a general revival of
real worship would follow on a scheme which
provided for voluntary attendance in chapel.
Suppose it were ordained that every boy must
attend at least three services a week. I think
that the result of such a scheme would very soon
tell on the tone of a school. It would do away
with the stereotyped routine of the present-day
system, and absence now and again would only
make the service the more precious to the boy-
mind.

Think of the difference in attitude of boys
towards the weekly voluntary Service of Inter-
cession in regard to the war on Friday nights
and their attitude to the ordinary morning and
evening compulsory prayers.

One is a real act of devotion, where the
atmosphere is tense with emotion, the others a
succession of lifeless lip-services, of little use
except to a rare few, and to them only on rare
occasions.

SERMON-TIME 37

As a matter of fact, since the war began the
question has been less pressing than before,
because nowadays the sonorous war collects
and majestic martial hymns of G. K. Chesterton
and Rudyard Kipling have done much to bring
home to boys the need for prayer and praise,
and have riveted their attention by their very
strangeness just at those points in the service
when their thoughts were most liable to go off
at a tangent to house matches or punishments,
friends or bathing. But most of all do I think
that the new influence is being felt on Sunday
evenings at sermon-time. Then do we feel most
ready to hear words of comfort or advice from
those carefully chosen strangers who come down
to uplift and sustain us in our time of trouble
and pour out of their fulness words of wisdom
which help us to live for another week at the
extraordinarily high tension which has char-
acterised us now for nearly a year.

Bishops, dons, headmasters, missionaries, and
famous old boys now appear with much greater
frequency than of yore, and each has some fresh
light to shed upon the attitude which we should
adopt at a time when our very souls are being
harrowed, our outlook on the meaning of life
and the relative values of actualities changing
with every day.

It is imagined by so many people that none
of our internal difficulties still beset us because
the nation is at war. This is not true. We have
not only all our old faults to be eradicated, all
our old horrors to combat, but the added load of

38 CHAPEL

this terrible war to bear ; we need all the help
we can get. Houses still run amok; individual
boys still give way to secret vices ; expulsion
is not entirely done away even yet ; the old
appeals to us to fight the good fight, to be
straight, to shun evil and to choose the good
are as necessaty as ever. They need saying,
perhaps now more than ever, for much of the
evil that went on in public schools was directly
due to the fact that boys were in a state of ennui.
They turned to the excitement and glitter of
vice out of sheer relief from the monotony of the
ordinary routine. Now that each boy is chafing,
as he never chafed before, to be up and doing,
to be away fighting or doing something tangibly,
obviously useful for his country, he feels the re-
straint and discipline of school life to be more
irksome than ever, and as a consequence is more
than ever tempted to seek for relief in whatever
way occurs to him.

In High Church schools, such as those of the
Woodard Foundation, it is quite conceivable that
he may find such relief in the definite part
allotted to him in the services, as acolyte,
bearer of the cross, and so on, but in our more
normal schools there is no active part given to a
boy unless it be the lesson-reading by prefects.
I should like to see a state of things brought
into being where nearly all those senior boys
who wished it might be permitted and encouraged
to serve at the Holy Communion or to take
some definite part of the service ; perhaps some
of the apathy is at present due to the sound of

SOME SUGGESTED REFORMS 39

accustomed voices taking the services day in,
day out, interminably. Out of a staff of
twenty or thirty it is rare to find more than
three or four men in orders, and the variation
in the prayer-reading must perforce be slight ;
it is, I know, only a point of detail, but it has
its direct influence on the attitude of the school
towards chapel.

Again, too, I can recollect occasions when a
headmaster has had frequently to urge the
school to join in the responses, the psalms, and
hymns. Particularly is this the case in schools
where the choir is very carefully trained and has
a reputation to keep up. Surely the foremost
principle of school services should be that each
boy should join in as often as possible in every
part of the service where the congregation is
expected to take its part.

Nothing is more touching than to hear an
assembled crowd of boys really sing with full-
throated vehemence and sincerity a favourite
hymn or psalm, which brings me to a most im-
portant problem in the conduct of services. The
choosing of suitable hymns is one of great diffi-
culty— a strange tune, an unknown hymn does
more to damp the ardour of really spiritually-
minded boys than anything I know. A few
psalms constantly sung, a small list of well-
known hymns, seem to me to be the most
suitable in existing conditions. There is, I
know, the danger lest these become meaningless
if the changes are rung on a very small number ;
to strike the happy mean between the few and

40 CHAPEL

the many is one of the hardest of a headmaster's
or choirmaster's minor difficulties.

My last point is one of immense importance
and overshadows all the rest. At present
there seems to be far too great a cleavage
between chapel and the rest of our lives. I
would, for instance, have the psalms and
hymns brought more continually into the
ordinary work of the classroom. How splendid
an opportunity is offered in the teaching of
English from the noble Elizabethan prose as
written in the Bible ! To divorce the Bible
from other books seems to me to be a mistake.
It is one of our national characteristics to keep
several watertight compartments in our souls :
religion in one, chemistry in another, games in
another. Until these are all correlated I can
see no hope for progress or for a national refor-
mation in our attitude to religion, work, games,
or life. Chapel is one of the most formative of
the many influences that work on the boy-mind,
but if chapel is only one phase of our religion —
the most real, I grant, but still only a phase —
there is little chance of our turning out the
God-fearing, clean-minded, upright citizens
whom it is our job, as schoolmasters and
guardians of the race, to educe.

CHAPTER VI
HYMNS

'•'■ It has been the frequent lamentation of good men that
verse has been too little applied to the purposes of worship,
and many attempts have been made to animate devotion
by pious poetry ; that they have very seldom attained
their end is sufficiently known, and it may not be improper
to inquire why they have miscarried."

Dr. Johnson, Life of Waller.

The importance of this subject at the present
day is apt to be overlooked. Chapel is taken
so much as a matter of course, like meals, that
it is frequently forgotten that more verse of a
devotional type than of all secular kinds is put
before the normal, imitative boy. Twice a day
on weekdays and at three services on Sundays
throughout the term, the boy's mind is con-
fronted by the poetic efforts of our hymn com-
posers— confronted in a way that he finds
difficult to disregard ; for the fact that they are
put to music, and therefore assimilated slowly,
naturally tends to every line, every word being
carefully thought out and commented on by any
fairly intellectual member of a congregation.

It is obvious, then, that the evils of doggerel
will be magnified just as the good will accrue

42 HYMNS

from the slow rendering of a great poem. We
are privileged to hear English prose at its
noblest and most majestic in the Collects and
Bible ; in the Psalms we are uplifted by the
gorgeous beauty of the poetic thought, and
by the time that we reach the hymn our minds
are malleable, impressionable, attuned to higher
things and the most godlike aims. The Spirit
of God has descended like a dove, and we are
prepared to give up our souls to His service, our
lives for His Name.

The hymn is that which " makes or mars
us quite." If it happens to be one of the few
in the language that combine great literary
merit with devotion, the service becomes an
ecstasy, a paean of thanksgiving — aesthetically,
emotionally, soulfully we lose ourselves in
heaven above ; but if the heights to which we
rise on the one hand are supreme, to how black
a depth do we fall if our senses are jarred, our
minds upset, our intellects outraged by some
disgraceful rhyming utterance of a mind neither
in the true sense religious nor intellectual.

No one is quicker to detect a false sentiment,
a hollow ring in speech or in the written tongue
than the average schoolboy ; once he detects
that some of his school hymn-writers are im-
postors, possessing neither genius, a knowledge
of or love for God, nor understanding of the
rest of the world, he feels it to be a personal
affront that he should be compelled to sing or
to listen to these hollow efforts.

It seems to me so important a matter only to

HYMNS OF GENIUS 43

have the hymns of genius that I would only
include some of the works of Charles Wesley,
William Cowper, Smart, one old Irish hymn that
appeared in The Nation about three years ago,
Ben Jonson, a few of Milton's and Addison's,
most of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century
writers, even up to the end of the seventeenth
century (including some of the works of Tate
and Brady), Newman, Isaac Watts, Toplady,
Ken, Keble, Lyte, Milman, Heber, and
Williams.

There are very few hymns outside the works
of these men that will satisfy that inner crav-
ing to be at once uplifted in body, soul, and
mind.

To add to our confusion, the words that we
are so used to in the Ancient and Modern version
have in many cases been wantonly disregarded
and others (naturally in most cases worse)
substituted — it is a moot question whether any
man has a right wilfully to alter the words of a
poem ; it is a sacrilege if it is real poetry. The
hymn ought not to be included if it is not ; at
any rate we were better off when we had the
Ancient and Modern version pure and undefiled —
we could at least pick and choose, and if we
chose a hymn of genius we could be sure that
we were using the author's own words, not a
garbled, distorted version to meet the parti-
cular narrow taste of a bigoted section of the
Church. But having chosen to eliminate and
to reconstruct, as the authors of most public
school hymn-books have done, the least they

44 HYMNS

could do was to abolish in their select edition
such lines as :

" Whatever, Lord, we lend to Thee,
Repaid a thousandfold will be :
Then gladly will we give to thee,
Who givest all,"

which, if believed and acted on, would inculcate
a spirit at once so devilish and commercial (in
its worst sense) as to prevent effectually any
further understanding of the very elements of
Christianity .

To take an entirely different standpoint : — Who
that has been brought up on such a passage of
real feeling and beauty as

" He shall feed me in a green pasture, and lead me
forth beside the waters of comfort "

can help a thrill of shame and horror when he
finds the signature of Addison to the following
paraphrase ? —

" When in the sultry glebe I faint,
Or on the thirsty mountain pant,
To fertile vales and dewy meads
My weary wandering steps He leads :
Where peaceful rivers, soft and slow,
Amid the verdant landscape flow."

Not only is the aesthetic sense outraged, but we
feel towards Addison as we do towards some
country parson, illiterate and uninspired, who
for a sermon decides " to put into simpler
language and explain the story of the Prodigal
Son." It is criminal.

ADDISON AS HYMN-WRITER 45

But Addison is not content with paraphrase ;
he must needs amplify ; his pen runs riot ;
he has not the reticence of the Psalmist ; he
proceeds :

" Though in a bare and rugged way,
Through devious lonely wilds I stray,
His bounty shall my pains beguile :
The barren wilderness shall smile
With sudden green and herbage crowned,
And streams shall murmur all around."

What warrant for this appalling versified
nonsense is to be found in the Twenty-third
Psalm ? In singing a hymn such as this, if we
are not entirely asleep, moods, like shivering
fits, eddy to and fro through our frame ; in this
verse disgust and horror give way to laughter.
We ask ourselves, what is "sudden green"?
But the worst is still to come. We have been
taught from our childhood and implicitly have
relied on that most inspiring verse of hope and
faith :

" Yea, though I walk through the valley of the
shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art
with me : Thy rod and Thy staff comfort me. . . ."

There is a good deal of the Bunyan in each of
us. That verse, together with the whole of that
wonderful Psalm in which occur the words,
11 Thou shalt not be afraid for any terror by
night ... a thousand shall fall beside thee, and
ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall
not come nigh thee," upheld me as a boy during
the plague of small-pox at Gloucester and

46 HYMNS

at school when really serious diseases .were
common — selfishness, boyishness, I grant, but
at least they made a real impression on me.
The spirit of them at least I do understand
now ; but what of this translation of Addison :

" Though in the paths of death I tread,
With gloomy horrors overspread,

Thy friendly crook shall give me aid,

And guide me through the dreadful shade " ?

I should like to meet the man or boy who was
comforted, elevated, or consoled by that verse,
or any portion of that hymn .

I have dwelt at some length on this particular
piece of verse, because I feel that if a really
sound man, or literary genius, of the stamp of
Addison fails in devotional poetry there is
something to be said for the Johnsonian theory
that contemplative piet}r, or the intercourse
between God and the human soul, cannot be
poetical. And yet it was the same man who

wrote :

" Through all eternity to Thee,
A joyful song I'll raise :
For O ! eternity's too short
To utter all Thy praise."

Johnson's theory would deny the title of
poetry to the hymn which opens :

" God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform ;
He plants His footsteps in the sea
And rides upon the storm."

It is by a peculiarly Sophoclean irony (so dear

DEFINITION OF POETRY 47

to the heart of Shakespeare and all great
dramatists) that at the very time when Johnson
was saying that —

" Man, admitted to implore the mercy of his Creator,
and plead the merits of his Redeemer, is already in
a higher state than poetry can confer,"

Cowper was writing hymns to prove the fallacy
of the statement. Dr. Johnson unfortunately,
like many of his followers, had read too much
of the " metrical devotions " of Tate and Brady
to understand the real meaning of the word
poetry.

To substitute " poetry " for " prayer " in the
well-known hymn of Montgomery, Johnson
would never have recognised that poetry

" . . . is the soul's sincere desire,
Uttered or unexpressed,
The motion of a hidden fire
That trembles in the breast."

But quite apart from the true poetic value,
there is another side very different but quite as
important . We are taught by one hymn to give
largely that we may receive more ; in some we
are taught as good Christians to revel in the
tortures of those who have not conformed to our
tenets or moral laws.

" But sinners filled with guilty fears,
Behold His wrath prevailing :

For they shall rise, and find their tears
And sighs are unavailing ;

The day of grace is past and gone ;

Trembling they stand before the Throne,
All unprepared to meet Him."

48 HYMNS

And again :

"■ Every eye shall now behold Him,
Robed in dreadful majesty ;
Those who set at nought and sold Him,
Pierced, and nailed Him to the tree,

Deeply wailing,
Shall the true Messiah see."

The side of the friendliness of God, of the out-
stretched hand, the sympathetic side of His
nature, is all too little emphasised ; remember
the extraordinary capacity and need for love
that a boy has — and think of the effect of such
a hymn as

" O Jesus, I have promised
To serve Thee to the end ;
Be Thou for ever near me,
My Master and my Friend,"

on a boy of imagination, lonely in the deepest
recesses of his heart. This hymn carries with it
the reality of religion, the sense of worship, the
use of Christ, and it is only when such a mood
has been reached that the true meaning ot the
following verse strikes right home, the heavenly
affection strengthening human love :

" And then for those our dearest and our best,
By this prevailing presence we appeal ;
O fold them closer to Thy mercy's breast,
O do Thine utmost for their soul's true weal ;
From tainting mischief keep them white and clear,
And crown Thy gifts with strength to persevere."

This could only be uttered by a confiding
friend to another, more powerful than himself,

WHAT TO AVOID 49

one to whom he could always turn with entire
trust.

What we wish for is less of the

" Make haste, O man, to live,
Thy time is almost o'er "

sort of devotion, and more of the panegyric —

" Human tears and human laughter,
And the depth of human love."

Less of the

" Weary of earth and laden with my sin,"

And more of

" For the thrill, the leap, the gladness
Of our pulses flowing free."

More of

" Run the straight race through God's good grace " ;

More of

"Chasing far the gloom and terror";

Less of

" By Thy deep expiring groan."

In a school chapel above everything we want
realities ; something to show us that Christianity
is an optimistic, buoyant, cheerful, absolutely
happy religion where human feelings and failings,
successes and misadventures, loves and hatreds
are taken into account.

50 HYMNS

The Bible does so : let us see to it in our wise
choice of hymns that they do not fall behind or
contradict the truth and splendid martial vigour
of the rest of the literary part of our daily
services.

CHAPTER VII

SUNDAY

When I was a boy I remember that I looked
forward to nothing so much as the weekly
walk on Sunday afternoon with my dearest
friend.

Then it was that, ambling idly along a bank
with a revolver, taking pot-shots at water-rats,
lazing in a coppice, pipe in mouth, or sitting in
the kitchen of a farmhouse bargaining for apples,
we used to get to grips with a world not. ours in
the hurry and bustle of school life.

We would argue on matters ethereal, on the
body politic or civic, but rarely or never thought
at all of those petty scandals and rows that
encompassed us about in dormitory or in the
classroom, on the " footer " grounds or in the
tuck-shop, on parade or in the " gym."

We became, as we walked through the in-
vigorating air, citizens of a larger, nobler, more
important world, free to let loose our thoughts,
constrained and groove-ridden in the precincts
of the school and buildings ; we were free to
indulge what fancies we would, free to people
our finer world with finer companions than we
met in hall or sat next to in chapel ; masters
5

52 SUNDAY

and prefects were forgotten, and heroes of make-
believe and romance took their place.

As I meet the youngsters of to-day climbing
the hill out of the town on Winchborough Downs,
or looking for eggs in Lord Poltimore's preserves,
I sometimes wistfully gaze into their eyes and
wonder if they have the same thoughts that I
had when I was a boy, — thoughts that were re-
luctant to include the prying usher or elder boy,
thoughts far away from the world of grind and
games : it is on such occasions that I am irre-
sistibly led to ask lonely pedestrians to tea, even
when they are not members of my form, set,
platoon, or game.

I nearly always repent. They invariably
accept, and accept with alacrity ; but outspoken
and natural as they appear as they wriggle along
by my side down into the town, they become
tongue-tied and nervous within doors in the
presence of my wife, and during tea do nothing
but eat as if they were about to die of starvation .
They have no small-talk except on the dangerous
topics of other boys or other masters ; they are
willing to recapitulate and go into details with
regard to the scandal of the hour, but of the
outside world they are ludicrously silent, and
feign an ignorance we know to be unreal.

They will discuss revues, musical comedies,
and the latest plays generally, varied occasion-
ally by the shortcomings of politicians ; but
they fight shy at once of topics of real and
lasting interest, however tactfully these are
introduced.

BOY FRIENDS 53

They are not the same boys we know and
grow to love so well in form ; all at once they
seem to have become gauche, grotesque, out
of place.

This must be the reason why the majority of
men invite the same boys over and over again
and neglect the great majority . . . for once
you have made a close friend of a boy you will
certainly realise, and probably for the first time,
what Bacon meant when he said that true friends
halve sorrows and double joys.

I suppose no letters are more treasured than
those natural outpourings of youth's desire
which come from the heart of a well-loved boy
friend ; no moments in one's life could be more
precious than those all too short minutes on
Sunday evenings when the boy escapes to your
room, and, lying on the carpet, gazes into the
fire and almost as it were in a trance unburdens
his mind of all the troubles that beset it, empty-
ing himself to you as to a real friend, asking for
help in the sure knowledge that in you he will
get it. It is then only that you realise the un-
fathomable depths, the innate innocence, the
awful purity, the clear-eyed vision, of the child-
mind.

We are apt to forget our own childhood, to
read into the minds of the boys with whom we
associate something of our own soiled and tainted
ideas.

In the mass no collection of beings is highly
sensitive, at all innocent, or (except in rare
cases) even pleasant ; some strange, malign

54 SUNDAY

influence seems to get to work as soon as two or
three are gathered together for whatever object.
We see boys most frequently in the mass ; con-
sequently we are apt to judge them in the mass ;
but take an individual boy, take him seriously to
your heart, endeavour to study his every idiosyn-
crasy, and you will soon discover, not blinded by
love to his vices, but rather through love with
your eyes for the first time opened, what a
kingdom of heaven in little dwells in the heart
of the average boy.

" Rarely the time and the place and the loved
one all together."

Sunday is the only day, Sunday the hardest
worked day of all at a public school, Sunday
full of its chapel-services, practices, rehearsals,
literary societies, debates, arrears of cor-
respondence and corrections to be worked off,
the very day when we pine most of all for a rest .
Let them all go . . . Sunday is the only day
when you really get a chance of seeing into the
boy- mind, which after all is your life-mission
if you are a serious schoolmaster and not merely
a M drifter." Sunday is the day when the work-
aday world can most easily be doffed or forgotten
by the boy, when under the influence of sacred
things he can most easily show you his natural
self, when the craving for human companionship
and sympathy overcomes the artificial inbred
tendency never to reveal his likes or dislikes
to any other human being.

There is a kind of glamour cast over Sunday :
we get up later ; there is a chance at last for

SUNDAY EVENING 55

quiet thought ; it comes as a break and relief
after six days' monotonous grind wherein all
tendency to think is/)usted for lack of time.

Shapes of trees and buildings, scenic colours,
passing clouds, the mysteries of hedgerows and
upland downs appeal to us no more in vain on
Sunday, for the luckier among us make time to
go and loll about on stiles or by the river-bank
and by quiet contemplation regain our lost soul.

By the time that Sunday evening comes round
even the dullest of us are ready to be influenced
by the preacher in the school chapel ; the
warmth, the lights, the sense of nearness to and
companionship with our dearest friends all unite
to make us more than ever open to impressions.
Then, if ever, are we ready to respond to whatever
call is made upon our honour ; self-sacrifice and
the cultivation of all the higher virtues appeal
to us then as at no other time in the week. I
suppose there is no other time when a con-
scientious, keen master would give his whole
soul to know what goes on in the minds of boys
than on those occasions, when he watches the
school file slowly out of evening chapel after
hearing the mighty inspiring message of a great
preacher who has held his audience spellbound
for thirty-five minutes.

Yearningly he turns as he separates himself
from the groups of friends and seeks his classroom
to prepare his work for Monday morning.

Gradually the hum of voices dies away, the
lights one by one disappear, the gates clang to . . .
all is silent save for the scratching of his pen . . ,

56 SUNDAY

an hour passes. He fumbles his way downstairs
to his bicycle, is let out by the school porter . . .
and is once more in the garish streets, thronged
with soldiers, shop-assistants, Salvation Army
bands, motorists, and servant girls. . . . Sunday
for him is over. The inspiration dies. Monday
and the workaday world lie too near at hand.

But he has had his day, and the halo will not
entirely disappear.

CHAPTER VIII

SOME SOCIETIES

At the outset I should like to make clear my
fundamental point with regard to this paper.
Though I may in the course of it rather poke
fun at some school societies which strike me as
being typical, it is not that I fail to recognise
their worth. What we want is not fewer, but
many, many more of them — house debating and
dramatic clubs, form reading societies . . .
cliques and sets all over the school intent upon
improving their histrionic and public-speaking
faculties, ready to read papers and listen to
others on subjects of literary, political, historical,
or philosophical importance. At Oxford it
seemed to me that most of the so-called literary
clubs to which I belonged were merely an excuse
for a revel and an orgie : at any rate they made
for camaraderie and a cheerful bonhomie, which
was so much to the good ; but at school the
pendulum swings to the other side, and we find
societies like the " Quidnuncs " flourishing on
stilted convention like a green bay tree.

The " Quidnuncs " was founded twenty-five
years ago by a keen literary housemaster, who
collected half a dozen of the most brilliant boys

37

58 SOME SOCIETIES

and cajoled them to come to his drawing-room
on Sunday evenings after chapel, for the purpose
of reading papers and discussing them.

He met with overt hostility from all the rest
of the staff, the majority of whom proclaimed
their conviction that one term would see the
decease of the society. After twenty-five years,
without a break of any kind, the " Quidnuncs "
still meet Sunday after Sunday.

Modifications, of course, have taken place,
changes from the original scheme. It is now
the literary society of the school ; only fifteen
boys are allowed to be members, and these are
elected by the committee ; there are eight
honorary members, three of whom are famous
literary lights in England, old boys, who seldom
remember to come back ; the remaining five
are present masters on the staff. Besides these,
however, wives of all the married members of
the community and several townspeople are
allowed to come to these meetings and listen
to the papers read.

The young enthusiastic master, full of literary
ideals, hangs on the verge of this highly select
society, and hungers for the day when he may
be invited to join the ranks. He pictures in his
mind a scene pregnant with literary ideals :
frenzied debates as to the merits of this or that
genius, people clamouring to read papers on the
merits of their own particular gods, ready to
take up arms against a sea of criticism in defence
of them. One day he receives his formal
invitation.

EVENING WITH " THE QUIDNUNCS " 59

At 8 . 1 5 p .m . he presents himself, palpitating, at
the front door of one of the housemasters (the
venue now changes weekly from one house-
master's drawing-room to another), is ushered
into a room full of people, all of whom are ob-
viously in a state of constraint and strange
nervousness.

The subject for this evening is " George
Meredith " ..." a gorgeous subject," thinks
our young enthusiast to himself.

Whispers, a shuffling of feet, a dive for a chair,
and another breathless silence.

The President speaks. " We are all ready,
Hankey."

The reader of the paper, be-spectacled, nervous,
white-faced, adjusts his glasses, clears his throat,
rustles his manuscript, and begins : " Ladies and
gentlemen, after the very brilliant paper read to
us last week by Mr. Tarrant-Hinton I cannot do
aught but apologise for my halting phrases and
the even poorer (if possible) enunciation with
which I deliver this paper. ..."

They all start like that without exception.
Our young enthusiast, not knowing this,
shivers with apprehension and glances round,
to find that no one else has even winced ;
apparently this is a gambit of conventional
openings .

Follows a life of Meredith, bald as a billiard
ball and not half so interesting, a patchwork of
irrelevant quotations, not a tithe of which does
the reader himself even pretend to understand,
the plot of The Egoist outlined in detail,

60 SOME SOCIETIES

and, to finish with, a general criticism culled
from a paper — and the hour is over.

In the sixty minutes' reading there has not
been one original remark, one comment of the
reader himself ... he belongs to a conventional
society, he must feed the conventional mind on
what it expects, thinks it understands, and can
assimilate. . . .

Our young visitor, full of ardour, now boiling-
over with wrath, unthinking, breaks the silence
that follows the hushed clapping of hands that
closes each day's paper with, " Do you really
think Meredith ever thought that about women ;
after his own experience, too ? You remember
that passage in his Letters ..."

" Supper is ready, I think, Harold," interrupts
the hostess loudly. The company rises.

Discussion is over : there is no discussion.
Conversation at the prolonged agony called
supper, which, however, the boy-element seems
to appreciate more than the paper, runs on the
sermon, yesterday's games, a change in the school
rules, and a coming bazaar.

Meredith is not so much as named from begin-
ning to end. Our young man finds this a normal
evening. Once, perhaps twice, in the year a
young rebel manages to gain access to the society,
and is invited to read : he chooses Byron ; he
says what he means ; the club stirs uneasily in
its chairs during the reading, honesty frightens
it out of its wits ; awful, constrained mutterings
over the supper-table follow. " The young brute
ought to be expelled ! The consummate in-

" THE STOLIDI " 61

decency and insolence of it all. How dare he
read like that and say such things . . .? " He
is not invited to read again ; the society again
settles down to its humdrum existence. And
yet, even at its lowest stage, the "Quidnuncs " is
a club we would not see done away. It does
lead boys to read ; it does bring before their
minds names which its members otherwise would
not have heard. But how much would we not
give to see it develop entirely as a literary society,
where members totally forgot their normal status
and responsibilities, and only met to further the
cause of literary endeavour, fearless of their
fellows, honest and original in their convictions,
ready to convince and be convinced.

The " Stolidi " is composed of a very different
collection of boys. It is a large society, which
may be joined by all boys who have emerged
from the Lower School.

It meets weekly in the Big School, and is
largely attended, in spite of the fact that the
work which ought to be done then has to be
made up for out of hours.

Hundreds of boys of varying ages may be seen
Saturday by Saturday rushing across the Green
Quadrangle with cushions under their arms, and
laden with deck-chairs, fighting to get the best
places nearest to the hot-water pipes. This is
not a " master-ridden " club. The President is
a young, earnest man, who thinks that public
speaking is one of the most educative influences
in a school, and so encourages every type of boy
to speak. With this one exception masters do

62 SOME SOCIETIES

not patronise the " Stolidi," except on special
occasions, when two well-known senior men
agree to lead and oppose a debate on a subject
of which each of them is a connoisseur.

Some two or three plays are read terminally —
Shakespeare seldom, Sheridan and Wilde often,
the very moderns on rare occasions. It is
truly hard to find plays which both touch
boys' interests and yet do not come under
the ban of the school censor, who is a real
martinet.

The Twelve-Pound Look and The Younger
Generation have, for instance, recently been
prohibited, and Magic was lucky to escape.
The club's greatest successes have been of late
The Rivals and Ccesar and Cleopatra, but such
plays are not common.

The evening starts with public business, always
an occasion for much heart-to-heart speaking.
Local feuds are started, enlarged, and finished
here more frequently than even the unimaginative
President imagines.

The convention-ridden atmosphere of the
public schools is nowhere more evident than on
the "Stolidi."

All the old arguments about tradition, the
glory of athletics, caste, and custom receive the
same salvoes of tumultuous applause; whereas
Liberal opinions, iconoclastic ideas, need for
reform in any department, always call down
hisses or are received in stony silence.1

1 This it no longer true : the Christmas term of 191 5 changed
all that.

" THE W.N." 63

Yet, in spite of all this, there are boys who
would never have dared to rouse themselves
out of the ruck of nonentities into which they
would almost unwittingly have subsided had it
not been for the " Stolidi." They have felt
themselves impelled to speak on some subject
very near to their heart ; and once having
spoken, the fever quickly gets a grip on them
and they rapidly become fluent, reasoned speakers,
astonishing themselves and their friends by the
ease with which they speak and the excellence
of their matter.

If schools are hedged in on every side by
custom and tradition, there is perhaps less
reverence for either here on the M Stolidi " than
elsewhere ; but, as in the case of the " Quid-
nuncs," we could wish with all our hearts that
members could forget entirely their prestige and
position and speak for once from their hearts,
unconscious of self.

Perhaps the most useful club of all which we
possess is the "W.N." — "the Wednesday-
nighters " — who assemble in Tighe- Warner's
rooms (Tighe-Warner is English master of the
Lower School), in order to listen while he reads,
or tells them famous stories, or declaims passages
from well-known plays. This master's sitting-
room is capacious and warm ; all the Lower boys
are made cordially welcome, and lie about all
over the floor chewing chocolates and fruit, which
the crafty usher dispenses in order to entice
them into his den.

The room is lined with well-filled bookshelves,

64 SOME SOCIETIES

and each member of the " W.N." is at liberty to
remove any book which appeals to him for three
days at a time, merely by writing the name of
the book he requires and his initials in a large
ever-open notebook, which is fastened on one of
the window-sills.

Sometimes, when reading palls, each member
contributes a short story or poem of his own ;
and so generous have the contributions of the
" W.N.'s " been that there are now three volumes
of their works extant.

Nearly all of the work that can with truth be
called good is by one boy, but it is a tribute to
Tighe- Warner that he should have produced one
genius among his tribe ; the best part of the
rest of the verses and essays is the obvious delight
that went to the making of them ; artistry and,
in some degree, achievement can be detected
in even the worst of them. Terminally the
" W.N.'s " give a series of half-hour plays to an
audience of particular friends ; admittance by
invitation only, each member being permitted
to invite two outsiders . The dresses for these
plays come from London ; the school custos is
bribed to become programme-dispenser, lime-
light-man, and scene-shifter ; an hilarious
supper is given by Tighe-Warner to the cast
afterwards ; and the next few days he spends in
ruefully going over the inroads made by these
orgies into his already too slender income. But
he knows at heart that it is worth it.

Anything is worth while : the lavish ex-
penditure of much-needed money, the giving up

THE USE OF THESE SOCIETIES 65

of precious hours of leisure, the despondent
moments consequent upon the failure to impress
upon one's material one's faith in a particular
author — anything is worth while.

More real education is to be found in these
literary, dramatic, and social clubs than in any
other department of school life ; they develop
the gifts of self-expression, of elocution, of the
imagination ; they provide the boy with food
for thought, with matter that will take him right
out of himself and enlarge his ideas beyond the
narrow scope of school ; he begins to realise that
there is a world elsewhere into which he may
expect — nay, will be expected — to enter and
probably control.

He learns to exercise his sympathetic faculties,
to look with other men's eyes on human life and
human suffering. Books he will find are perhaps,
as some one has said, a mighty bad substitute for
life, but he will also find out that they are at
least a very good guide as to how life should be
lived. They are, at times, the only source of
comfort upon which a man can fall back ; at
moments of grave crisis, in ecstatic moments of
great happiness a man will retire to his study
and turn over the pages of somemuch-bethumbed,
much-loved book, and gain comfort and inspira-
tion therefrom when he needs it most.

But this love of literature must be cultivated
when the heart is young and the character mal-
leable. In no better way can such a love be
matured than in these clubs which already exist .
I would have them, with all their faults, multi-

66 SOME SOCIETIES

plied a million-fold. There would be, there are,
there have been, appalling irretrievable mistakes,
made with regard to such school societies, but I
would risk all that for the sake of the success of
the majority of them. Boys are born actors ;
let them act, encourage them at all times to
act ; boys have a far finer imagination than
most adults ; encourage them to cultivate their
imaginations by reading and talking about the
finest works of genius.

We have been too long in the shadows of the
tyranny of the ugly : let us cast off our false
shame and openly pursue the beautiful. These
literary societies open up the way ; let us not let
such opportunities slide, for on them depends the
welfare of the future of the race.

CHAPTER IX

CRIBBING

The question of " cribbing " raises two points of
quite considerable importance in the educational
world : what sort of attitude towards his work
does a boy adopt who must needs cheat at it ?
and what sort of teachers are those under whose
eyes such a distortion of true learning can take
place ?

I am not for the moment concerned with the
moral code involved in " cribbing." The whole
school code of honour requires drastic handling :
nothing less than a revolution will accomplish
any realisation on the part of youth that its
point of view is all wrong.

Imagine an enlightened age looking on im-
purity tolerantly, on cribbing as a harmless way
of evading punishment cultivated by all who
find that it pays, on coming to its masters for
sympathy and advice when in trouble as an
unforgivable crime, on " cutting " a game as an
offence which puts the delinquent beyond the
pale of respectable humanity.

I am concerned with its causes and results
alone. Whence does this horrible fungus which
undermines the whole of school life spring ?
6

68 CRIBBING

Well, partly from parents and uncles. Who
does not recollect some such conversation as this
from the jovial elder, especially after a good
dinner, when all men indiscreetly indulge in
reminiscences of their own early life ?

" We have heard the chimes at midnight,
Master Shallow." " Ha ! ha ! I remember
when I was at Winchborough in old Troddles'
form, how we used to pin our ' cribs ' on the back
of the fellow in front and read the Alcestis
straight off. He was as blind as a bat. I
was in his form for two years and never did a
stroke."

" Good Lord, man ! why, that's nothing.
At Upton, in the Rooster's days, when he used
to tell us to shut our books and write the ' props '
out there would be a great slamming of books
and then the old man would go to roost, close his
eyes, and in a minute was asleep. But every
one, of course, furtively opened his Euclid at
once when he had gone off, and wrote for dear
life. I recollect once old Hal Gurney — yes,
your godfather, George — old Hal was in an awful
stew because when he opened his book he found
that he had torn out the pages the term before
to crib in exams, with, you know. ... He
didn't know what to do — so he started to look
over the chap next to him, and suddenly the
Rooster woke up and yelled, ' What are you
doing, Gurney ? ' and Hal was in such a funk
that before he knew what he'd done he'd blurted
out, ' P-please, sir, the pages are out of my book,
sir, so I was just looking over Dixon's. Lord !

CONDONING THE OFFENCE 69

you should have been there. The Rooster was
a regular devil with the cane, too ! "

Every one has to listen to stories like this,
true or not true (I hope I have not invented two
too ridiculous examples ; I could so easily have
quoted from fact), when schooldays are mentioned
over the dinner-table.

In such a way do our major influences condone
the offence.

Is it a wonder that a boy straight from a
preparatory school (however good), where he has
imbibed the strictest ideas on right conduct,
finds that the way of life is a wondrous maze
when he has endured a month at a public school ?
He notices that quite estimable people " crib " ;
he remembers those scraps of conversation at
home where his elders took " cribbing " as an
essential factor of school life. What wonder that
he soon falls into line with the majority ! It
is the only way by which in some forms he can
maintain his position in the class. But I begin
to think from my foregoing remarks that my
point of view is perhaps liable to misconstruction.

In my own mind I believe that in reality far
less " cribbing " goes on than is generally sup-
posed, for several reasons. First, when is a boy
in such a position that he must needs indulge
in it ? I take it that the most common instance
is that in which he has not had time to prepare
his work for a master who is lavish with his
penal rewards in case of failure.

Now, the average man who is a stern and
terrorising despot is not of the kind to be hood-

70 CRIBBING

winked by the " cribber." The way of the
wicked in this case is very hard ; he will find
it exceedingly difficult to catch the demon off
his guard ; an unwary disciplinarian is an
anomaly, a contradiction in terms. With a
weak man who never dares to punish it is un-
likely that a boy will take the trouble to " crib "
unless he is exceedingly anxious to score high
marks.

But it is futile to indulge in generalities like
this ; let me take my own case. It is quite on
the cards that I am entirely wrong with regard
to the impression that I think I produce on boys,
but this is how I see myself. In English I take
my own form, all of whom are candidates for
outside examinations such as the London
Matriculation or the Army Entrance. They
are united in one aim, that is, to pass as quickly
as possible. Consequently I am relieved from
the necessity of marking their work at all ;
what I am there for is to teach, to correct their
mistakes, to get them through, and, far the
most important in my eyes, to instil a love of
our literature into their minds while I have them
with me.

There is no question of " cribbing " : it would
be a pointless pursuit. There is never occasion
for punishment, because each of these boys is
always doing his best. There is a great deal of
extra work to be done, papers to be revised and
done again when they fail, but this is not punish-
ment. It is not that I am a stern disciplinarian
— far from it. I love my subject ; I love my

THE GIVING UP OF WRONG MARKS 71

boys ; if I fail to interest them or to make them
work for the work's sake I have failed. I have
no penal code to fall back on.

On the other hand, I take a vast amount of
mathematics all over the school. I encourage
all my boys to correct the greater part of their
ordinary work for themselves in addition to
looking over it privately myself. Mr. JollifTe,
who once inspected us, strongly opposed this
system on the ground that it bred dishonesty
and was a strong incentive to cheating. I am
the more inclined to think that I am right and
he is wrong when I recollect that the school-
master probably knows more of boys than the
don who visits them for one week every five
years. But I do quite see that it is possible for
a boy to give up wrong marks (which after all
is only another kind of " cribbing ") in this way,
and for me not to discover it every time. As I
walk round and round the class all the time that
boys are writing I like to think that there is
never any likelihood of any boy being tempted
to " crib." I am not quite sure how he could.

In problems (my most frequent work, of course)
he most decidedly could not ; in geometry he
would find it mighty hard, for (like most modern
young pedagogues) I do not resort to the trick
of letting boys write out propositions. What
" cribbing " there is must go on in the classical
forms or where history notes are expected to be
learnt.

And this brings me back to general principles.
" Cribbing " is just as much an offence against

72 CRIBBING

the rights of man as cheating, lying, impurity,
or stealing. How, then, to deal with it ? First,
I suggest, by making work so interesting that
boys will begin to work for work's sake. It is no
use laughing at such a notion as crack-brained,
weak-kneed, or even as an impossible ideal.
It can be done, because it has been done. In
English I do it, and Heaven knows I am no born
teacher. Make a boy see that there is some-
thing vastly entertaining in the subject, explain
to him thoroughly the use that it will be to him
hereafter ; if it is a merely disciplinary subject
no good in itself, scrap it ; scrap it at once and
substitute a live subject in its place ; the theory
that a thing is good for you in proportion as it is
distasteful has gone for ever ; make a boy see
that the subject is your own life-hobby and is
every bit as important as (say) cricket or football,
that even grown men in the world outside
continue such a study for pure pleasure until
their lives' end, and the artificial stimulus of
marks and examinations — the bane of the usher's
existence — will disappear for ever, and naturally
with the marks will likewise vanish " cribbing,"
for there will be no point in it.

Punishment must go ; marks must go ; and
then, and then only, will interest revive and
" cribbing " die. It is no use telling me that
masters are not capable of bringing this about.
Sack all those who confess their inefficiency, and
bring in a new regime.

It only needs courage, an indomitable optim-
ism, and catching your boy young ; it might

MAKE CRIBBING COMPULSORY 73

perhaps be as well to hang all parents and
relatives who indulge in dangerous reminiscences,
but, as we have neglected parents for so long,
perhaps we might continue to do so with im-
punity. After all, they do not matter much
either way ; it is the future we are trying to save,
not the past.

Next I would suggest, more drastic even than
the first, that not only the Sixth Form, but all the
school should be encouraged to use real trans-
lations for all their classics. By " real " I mean
Gilbert Murray, Jowett, Jebb, and so on, as
opposed to Mr. Kelly and all his nefarious crew.
By that means there might be a spark of hope
that the boy of the future might realise, however
dimly, that there really was a " grandeur that
was Greece " and a " glory that was Rome."
Not one in a hundred does under existing con-
ditions. In other words, abolish " cribbing,"
by making it compulsory.

I do not want to end on a note of pessimism,
but I see that I said I would make a remark
on the results of " cribbing." I should have
thought that they were sufficiently obvious ;
but perhaps not. Well, in my opinion, a
lasting distaste for work is one of the most
important. How could you expect a boy to
be interested in translating word for word
from a Latin or Greek author into a language
which is certainly not English, or any other
that ever sane man talked, about as intelligible
to the average boy as the classics were to Milton's
unfortunate daughters ? Remember how they

74 CRIBBING

hated their father ; affection between a boy
and his master is not likely to be fostered if
this mischievous system is to be allowed, nay,
encouraged, to continue as it is to-day.

The whole point of modern education is to find
the bent of a boy's mind and to develop that at all
costs in order that when the time comes he may
become a specialist in his own line. Cribbing,
to make an almost Elizabethan-like pun, simply
cabins, cribs, and confines the mind, and pre-
vents it ever expanding on the right lines.
Further, I am in agreement with the moralists
when they assert that one vice leads to another —
a boy who becomes loose enough to crib is well
on the way to become loose in all the other
departments of life.

Lastly, as well as severing the link which
might bring master and boy together in a most
desirable communion, it goes even farther, and
threatens to sever close-knit friendships between
boy and boy, whose codes of conduct will diverge
according as one consents to the cribbing mania
and the other has the sense to refuse to have his
future spoilt even to appease a companion or
to hoodwink a master who is scarcely worth
deceiving.

CHAPTER X

RAGGING

Ragging consists of two major sorts : ragging
of masters bjr boys (ragging of masters by
masters is a delightful pastime, and much more
common than the general public would suppose,
but it need not detain us here), and ragging of
boys by boys (ragging of boys by masters is
also a delightful pastime, but of no importance).
These two sorts have also two subdivisions —
ragging which is healthy and ragging which is
unhealthy.

To take the ragging of masters by boys first,
if you are not already too confused by my
somewhat poor attempt to parody Burton to
want to read any more.

I cannot recollect any case in which I think
this to have been healthy ; but then, of course, I
am a master.

The first essential of any man who wishes to
become a schoolmaster is that he should be able
to keep order ; not that he does keep order ;
the very best masters I have ever known have
been those who cultivated a most easy-going
manner in form, who really talk and are talked
to as if the whole class were on a very successful

75

76 RAGGING

walking tour or were camping out together.
But that he should be able at any given instant
to restore absolute silence, to make the form do
what he wishes, is of the very life-blood of the
successful master.

If a man cannot do this, — it isn't a question of
being easy to acquire ; you either do it naturally
or you never do it at all, — if you cannot do this,
go away at once and keep hens, write novels,
starve in Bloomsbury, become a fisherman or
a miner, do anything that will help you to save
your soul alive, but do not stay to be harried
and bullied to death by a crowd of merciless little
gnats who despise you for not killing them, and
whom you despise for their utter inhumanit}'
and savagery. There is nothing more pitiable
in school life than the crushed man, the man
who knows that all his colleagues laugh at him
for being so ineffectual, who goes into form
sweating with apprehension, dreading every
footstep of approaching " boy," wondering
what devilish device the wretches have got
in store for him to-day.

Remember, please, that boys have no imagina-
tion. Consequently they never tire of being
cruel : they are precisely on the same moral
level with snakes and cats in this, that their
absolute lack of any imaginative faculty makes
them smack their lips over the sight of an old
man in pain at their malicious efforts to drive
him out of his mind again and again and again.
They never tire.

Nervous young graduates come to us full of

DISCIPLINE 77

the theory of education, fully prepared to open
their hearts to the innocent young under their
control ; and they discover at once that until
they can show " these innocent young " that
behind the silky tongue there lies physical power,
they are simply not listened to. I should not
care to have to count up the number of abso-
lutely excellent men whom I have known who
have come to the public schools fully deter-
mined to carry into practice ideals that we
simply must bring into being unless we are to
go under altogether, — men who have had to
leave after one term simply because they had
not this gift of being able to make a boy sit
down when he had decided to stand up, or vice
versa .

On the other hand (I am not certain which
is the more tragic), how many countless men
have I known who are rapidly making names
for themselves as successful schoolmasters who
under any sane system of education would have
been sacked after their first day ; men who have
this wonderful gift of being able to keep boys
in order, but beyond it nothing, nothing at all —
they would fail even as policemen ; they have
no powers of direction ; they can only hold
their hands up and keep the traffic at ba}7.
Successful schoolmasters indeed ! at a time
when we are crying out for men of liberal ideas
and courage and imagination to come and save
us.

But I am supposed to be talking about rag-
ging, a subject on which I am somewhat of an

78 RAGGING

authority, for I spent the best years of my
life as a boy in trying to devise new tortures for
a man who had been kindness itself to me,
but who had the misfortune to stammer and
blush. As a consequence I learnt nothing, and
he gained a whole-hearted loathing for the whole
race of boys.

This ragging of incapable masters by boys is
only comparable to the silly goose-cackle of the
country yokel when he sees a bicycle " skid "
in the wet, and a girl fall and cover herself with
mud.

That is his notion of humour ; a boy's sense
of humour is about as much developed : to see
a master or a friend in real agonies (spiritual, of
course ; physical bullying is slowly becoming
unfashionable ; we have now got to the refined
stage of inflicting torture on the soul : mere
arm-twisting was humane by comparison) — this
is a source of inexhaustible delight : it is surely
a sign of human progress that by the time he
reaches Oxford he is content to derive amuse-
ment by leaping on to a bonfire made from his
own and his friends' furniture.

I can think of nothing in school life which
so sickens me as this distorted sense of humour
on the part of nearly all boys. One moment
and I am passionately declaiming a passage of
Shakespeare, making myself believe that I really
am cultivating a sense of honour, of pathos, of
proportion, of real humour in the minds of my
boys ; they really look as if they are gaining
something ; they think they are too : five minutes

RAGGING OF BOYS BY BOYS 79

later they have left me and I hear them in
an adjoining classroom shouting, clamouring,
unanimous in one great burst of raucous, empty
laughter as the blackboard (by special arrange-
ment) falls on old " Flatfoot's " head. It
makes one at times almost despair of the whole
race of boys ; whereas, in my calmer moments,
I can quite see that it is not the fault of the
boys : it is the whole pernicious system that
encourages them to grow up like this. There
is no trace of a healthy side in the ragging of
masters by boys.

When we come to the ragging of boys by
boys we are faced by an entirely different
proposition. There is no question that there
are some boys who are only saved by being
laughed at.

Anstruther, to take an example, comes from
a famous private school at Broadstairs : he has
been captain of cricket and football, and head
of the school ; rather too full of his own im-
portance, he comes on to us. For the first
month of his new life he is persistently bullied
by all the Middle School fags to whom he has
foolishly boasted of his pristine greatness. There
is no doubt that this " squashing " does him
all the good in the world.

Roberts, on the other hand, is a long, lanky
scholar, who has outgrown his strength ; he is
very clever, very keen on his work, but quite
useless at games.

He finds himself all unconsciously at first the
butt of his house, of his form, and in the end of

80 RAGGING

the whole school : he never has the sense to go
for any of even the smaller fry who attack him,
owing to his kind-heartedness. Consequently
life is made more and more miserable for him ;
he goes off by himself for lonely walks, and does
his best to avoid all society ; he begins to think
how loathsome all human beings are — in such a
way are suicides, cynics, and atheists made.

His whole school life is one long, horrible night-
mare ; his masters smile when they meet him, and
perhaps get as far as thinking " poor fellow " : if
they go farther and try to make advances, Roberts
will retire into his shell at once, and be brusque,
and even violently rude from very nervousness.

The worst of it is that there are many boys
of about sixteen or seventeen who are just
beginning to put on airs, and likely to make fools
of themselves, who would be saved by laughter :
but no one, as a matter of fact, dare worry
them. The Seniors simply don't notice them ;
the Juniors live in daily terror of them.

These become the young " bloods-about-
town," interested only in sartorial effect, un-
healthy in mind and body, simply because they
have nobody to " rag " them out of their affecta-
tion.

A master occasionally takes it upon himself to
try to knock the nonsense out of such boys' heads,
but the average man is much too apt to con-
fuse cheap sarcasm (most loathed of boys)
with humorous ragging. His intervention only
serves to make matters worse, and the boys go
out of their way to dress so as to upset this

A GOOD INFLUENCE 81

master's susceptibilities and render themselves
conspicuous.

As soon as it becomes generally known that
these expressions of peculiarity are only meant
to cause irritation, and not as a species of
originality, the entire school endeavours to copy
the young heroes, or to do all in their power to
help in the scheme for the suppression of sarcasm
on the part of masters. . . .

After all, " ragging " is a harmless amusement
in nearly every case ; the whole subject depends
entirely on the possession or lack of a sense of
humour in " ragger " and " ragged."

There are some men who will never be cured
of silly foibles until they are ducked in a pond ;
of these are those foolish Bohemians, who think
that Bohemianism consists in wearing a red tie
and no collar, plush waistcoats and lurid
hats . . . ; who dispense with forms of custom,
courtesy, and manners, to show how superior
they are to the world about them.

At school such people are intolerable, and
have to be made to conform to the recognised
standard by whatever means public opinion
can most effectively bring to bear on them.

Boycotting is an inhuman crime ; gentle
" ragging " is a mercy thinly disguised, and if
deftly carried out, may prove to be the turning-
point of a boy's life.

Most growing youths need some outlet for
their stored-up, little-used vitality, and a useful
safety-valve lies here. On the other hand, no
people are so consistently cold-blooded, or more

82 RAGGING

unintelligent Iy, unwittingly cruel than a crowd
of boys, and it is little short of marvellous that
some hunted, unpopular boy is not occasionally
driven to suicide by the systematic bullying to
which he is treated.

It is when " ragging," which is in essence
gentle, degenerates into cruelty, which is in its
essence rough, whether intellectual or physical,
that a stop has to be put at all costs to the
least sign of ill-treatment on the part of any
clique of a school.

CHAPTER XI

PREFECTS

It has been said by more than one expert that
the crowning glory of the public school system
is the ingrained sense of being able to rule that
differentiates the public school boy from every
other type.

The characteristic ease with which a young,
inexperienced Englishman of twenty -three
controls a country twice the size of his own
is, and always has been, a matter of envy and
astonishment to foreigners of all other lands.

" Give a boy as much chance to develop his
own initiative as possible" — so runs the
tradition ; and ever since the days of Doctor
Arnold boys have been allowed more and more
scope to learn how to govern while they are still
at school, in order that, in after years, they may
find the reins of government as easy as fielding
in a house match or drilling a platoon in the
O.T.C.

It is all a question of custom. The only
question is — Who are the boys who deserve the
honour of prefectorial privileges ? Who are the
boys most likely to use their privileges aright,
and who are those most liable to abuse them ?

84 PREFECTS

Roughly speaking, the two types of boys who
strive for recognition most strenuously are the
Intellectual and the Athletic.

In some schools it is customary for the entire
Sixth Form to become ex-officio prefects, which
means that, as often as not, some entirely futile
appointments are made, for it by no means
follows that because a boy is really intellectual
he is morally or physically able to control a horde
of boys younger than himself.

The pity of it is that mere Intellect does not
command respect among boys — rather is the
reverse the case. The brilliantly intellectual boy
is more often than not original (an unforgivable
offence in boys' eyes) ; he does not take the
trouble to conform to what strike him as petty,
irksome rules of routine ; he is undisciplined and
prone to kick over the traces of good taste or
traditional form ; he forms a small and select
coterie of followers which will in all probability
be very unpopular. They will discuss the poetry
and prose of Decadence, the Pre-Raphaelites,
Shelley, Keats, and De Quincey in their dor-
mitories, not with understanding, much less with
appreciation, but just in order to keep them-
selves aloof from the common herd who read,
if they read at all, the Red Magazine, The Premier,
or, at the highest, Nash's.

There is, on the other hand, the Intellectual
who is acutely conscious of his shortcomings, but
wishes to stand on a dignity that he does not
possess, or is really anxious to inspire respect,
but is possessed of none of the faculties requisite

THE ATHLETE 85

to command that most intangible and unanalys-
able quality.

The Intellectual has the most unenviable job of
all, for it is more than likely that he will be
acutely nervous of the results of his endeavours ;
he will be self-conscious, owing to the develop-
ment of his aesthetic side, and imagine slights
and failures which are in reality non-existent,
whereas the merely Athletic will never be
troubled by doubts, owing to his obtuseness.
I must confess at once that I envy the lot
of the athlete who is an athlete before all
else, more than any one in the world.

He is obsessed by no troublous thoughts, as
the imaginative intellectual boy is, of whether,
after all, his is the best system of control. He
is accustomed to lead in the games, to cajole, to
drive, to encourage, riding rough-shod over any
who dispute his methods, by the simple applica-
tion of physical force, of which he naturally
possesses a great store.

Everything is made comfortable for him.
Boys and most men, constituted as they are,
admire brawn and muscle, a straight eye, and a
fearless tackle more than anything else. What-
ever a man possessed of these qualities bids them
do they do unquestioningly, only too proud to
be thought worthy of notice by the demi-god.
Such unthinking loyalty, amounting almost to
idolatry, fosters quite naturally a feeling in the
athlete's mind that he is the man who matters.
The result is not only deplorable but dangerous.
It leads to that quite unmistakable reaction on

86 PREFECTS

the part of our foremost educationists against
the evils of over-athleticism on the boy while
still at school. It leads to that nauseating golf,
cricket, racing, and football talk which occupies
the greater part of so many men's conversa-
tion to the exclusion of all else, whether it be
the old public school boy in his club, or the
old elemental school boy in his " pub."

Its overweening influence may be easily seen
by the prodigious amount of space given over to
descriptions of athletic contests by all the news-
papers which pander to the tastes of their readers,
and never dream of elevating the public taste
even to the level of the least intellectual member
of their staff.

At such a time as the present it even leads
to an extraordinary amount of rubbish being
talked about the " sporting " instinct of the
games-ridden men who have led (as usual) in the
trenches just as they led on the playing-fields.
Comparisons are invidious at the best of times,
but I cannot help asserting that it is my firm
belief that those men of noble imagination
but poor physique, poets, painters, and actors,
who have answered their country's call not
less certainly than the athletes, have shown
themselves just as capable in the moments of
stress, or when initiative of movement is re-
quired. I grant that such men feel the horror
and needlessness of war more than the others
who accept it all as part of the day's work, but
they are surely not the less honourable for
taking their share in what they consider to be

NEED OF IMAGINATION 87

a gross travesty of all human civilisation and
progress because they consider that by so doing
they may perhaps help to prevent any such
dastardly, wanton disturbance of nature's scheme
from occurring again.

It seems to me that here lies the kernel of
the whole matter.

Our leaders of the future ought to be men of
highly developed aesthetic taste, possessed of
that vivid imagination which prompts men
first of all to think of the cause of spiritual
progress rather than of material success ; we
have too long left the affairs of the State in the
hands of material-minded, selfish men.

All this " will never do." There is but one
cure. You can only influence a nation as you
influence an animal, by catching it young.

The present system of " prefectorial govern-
ment " is ideal in theory, but we should see to
it that no boy shall be allowed to lead others
unless he has proved himself to be devoted to
the cause of real progress, and has ideas beyond
the world of school.

At present a housemaster interviews his
senior boys and talks about the many " duties
and privileges of prefects " ; how they must
not let themselves be cheapened by preserving
their present friendships ; at all costs they are
to remember that the first essential of govern-
ment is discipline ; the moral and physical
well-being of the house is rubbed into them, but
little is said about the training of the malleable
younger members to think of the vast world-

88 PREFECTS

wide problems upon which they will have to
make up their minds so very soon and without
any warning.

The root of the trouble lies in the fact that
the masters themselves " never have time " to
make up their minds about the great problems
of the outside world ; they take the agelong
accepted opinions of their fathers, and eye with
suspicious horror any theorists who dare to
suggest that innovations might occasionally be
beneficial to the country.

It is this stereotyped conservatism that is so
dangerous a sign of the times in our great schools.
Boys and masters alike are eaten up by tradition ;
it has become so much a religion to them that
any suggestion of novel precepts is regarded as
idolatry. Any young master full of enthusiasm
for his programme for the regeneration of the
mind of man through the public schools finds it
difficult to meet with sympathy from his col-
leagues. He must fall into line with the rest and
accept traditional customs. His idiosyncrasies,
whether mere details of clothing, speech,
manners or way of walking, or the greater
idiosyncrasies of the mind which have developed
his imagination so that he can take an interest
in books or pictures or sculpture, are all food
for adverse cricitism from his form or Common
Room, until he finds himself suddenly outcast, a
pariah, unable to achieve any of those reforms
which led him to give up all for the sake of the
future of the race.

But I am talking too much in the air. Baffled

SOME TYPES 89

as I have been on all sides in my own attempts
to make people see that there is anything wrong
with public schools as they are, I am in danger
of becoming embittered.

Let me give you a picture of some types with
whom I have come into contact, and leave you
to draw your own conclusions.

I have in my mind a few actual prefects I have
known.

The first, Arbuthnot, is a not over-intelligent
(so far as school-work goes) member of the
Shooting VIII. and Football XV., the son of
a company promoter who likes to see his money's
worth and is not over-pleased at his boy's
repeated requests for more books. I used to
see a good deal of Arbuthnot because he came
to me for English essays and was an omnivorous
reader. I once allowed him to ransack my
library because I found, much to my surprise,
for he was a popular boy, that he was intensely
unhappy at school ; the only outlet he had for
his emotions was writing poetry, and that of a
kind modelled on " The Everlasting Mercy "
and " The Widow in the Bye-Street." I did
not wish to drive him away from books altogether
by suddenly substituting Milton for the more
lurid poets who had attracted him, but it was
an extraordinarily arduous business diverting
him from the moderns, the contributors to
" The Yellow Book," back to the calm majesty
of the classics.

He was a wild devotee of debates here ; having
assimilated the notions of Shaw and others, he

90 PREFECTS

would delight to throw bombs about in the
most careless manner. This caused him to gain
a certain notoriety, as a result of which he
became editor of a flagrant publication entitled
The Hornet, which nearly brought about his
instant expulsion : the lampoons upon the staff
were never forgiven, and he became more and
more harassed by his house and other masters
until he implored his father to take him away.
He became a prefect for two terms before he
left, but never took the trouble either to keep
order or to preserve that sense of dignity in
himself which it is of the first importance that
prefects should cultivate. In consequence he
was by a strange anomaly beloved in his " house,"
and when he started to " rag " the house games,
the spirit of revolt against athletics spread like
wildfire and he became a sort of god among the
smaller fry.

It was not until he had actually left school
and been at Cambridge for a year that he came
to see how foolish his conduct at school had
been : it was a sort of kicking against the pricks
with no adequate purpose : he had been un-
happy for no very cogent reason, and had
wreaked his vengeance on a school which would
not take the trouble to find out where one
individual member was being unwittingly rubbed
up the wrong way. As a prefect his influence,
which might have been and should have been
excellent, was malign : it took the house at
least a year to recover its prestige in the eyes
of the rest of the school : it had become slack,

MORE TYPES 91

lost its sense of esprit de corps, and gone in for
crankiness and the cult of foolishness.

Another prefect I have in mind is Howard.
He also is the head of a house, devoutly
religious, a Philistine in thought and intellect,
an indomitable worker at school subjects,
because he knows that he must get a scholarship
if he wishes ever to get to Cambridge, a strong
athlete by reason of continued plodding rather
than by any natural genius, and a rigid disciplin-
arian. He has no difficulty with his house, no
doubt about his success ; he is the " model
boy," held up to admiration on Speech Days, the
recipient of many prizes, an inexhaustible source
of joy (and incidentally a wonderful saver of
trouble) to his housemaster.

Years hence we shall talk of him with bated
breath as " that wonderful boy Howard " who
rescued a house which was going to rack and
ruin, established it on sound lines, and kept
it going entirely " off his own bat " — and quite
rightly. He is a valuable product.

Then there is Watson, the great spectacled
classical scholar — nervous, futile, hideous. You
see him in every school. From his earliest days
at his first private school he has been trained in
the classics very much as a prize Pomeranian
is trained for the shows. He goes through his
public school exactly as a prize dog would.
Nothing matters except the assimilation of the
classics — eternal Latin and Greek. He never
derives any ghost of an idea as to what it all
means. The aesthetic joys onfy to be gained from

92 PREFECTS

the Greeks are hidden from him ; he is mentally
blind ; he no more enjoys his food than the dog
does — he takes it because it is good for him.
In the end, he goes to Balliol, after years of
incompetence at school, where he has been the
" butt " of the Lower School ; he takes (perhaps)
a First in " Greats," and returns to vomit the
undigested masses of the classics which he has
stored up to other boys of a later generation,
and continues to be the " butt " of his form for
the rest of his life, until he dies " unwept, un-
honoured, and unsung " — a pitiable tragedy.
Is such a man likely to influence a malleable
generation for good ? I think not.

I have taken up too much space already
with these types. Let me conclude with one
more friend of mine — Herbertson.

He is fairly athletic, tremendously keen on
all the problems of the day, possessed of a
liberal intelligence, anxious only to develop his
intellect, so that he may be the better able to
take an unbiased view of life, and so help to
the best of his ability suffering humanity.
Consequently he reads omnivorously all the
poetry, history, novels, and sociological works
that he can lay his hands on.

This does not endear him to the rest of the
house, who talk of games to the exclusion of all
else. In a house match he will play a brilliant
game ; but the night after, if any one starts to
comment on it, his usual remark is, " Oh, for
God's sake, shut up ! "

His path is made as difficult for him as possible,

CONCLUSIONS 93

both by his housemaster and juniors, who, like
all unimaginative people, hate what they do not
understand.

It is useless to elaborate further. I have
given you fair specimens in existing circum-
stances, and leave it to your judgment. The
question is: "Is all well as we stand?"
I am far too much of an optimist to
think so. Hence my cry from the housetops
until I make the people hear. It is the only
means left, so puny seem my own personal
efforts as an assistant master in a big school.

At times I get so dispirited at the attacks that
are made upon my u loyalty," my " upsetting,
irrational, nonsensical notions," that I feel
inclined to let things slide, to acquiesce, and be
comfortable ; on such occasions the only weapon
left me is my pen — so, with my lance in rest, I
go on tilting at windmills.

CHAPTER XII

SCHOOL MAGAZINES

A school magazine to be successful must be
of illegitimate birth.

The school " mag," as the official organ is
usually called, is too heavily censored, as be-
comes " official organs," to reflect the real
opinion of the school on any point of local im-
portance ; the writer has to take into account
what the headmaster, housemasters, and all the
staff think before he dare put forward a new
theory. There is always lurking at the back
of his mind the fearful thought that he may
be committing a grave breach of etiquette in
propounding a fresh theory about compulsory
games, attendance in chapel, the validity of
certain old-established traditions and unwritten
laws : he may be accused of treachery, dis-
loyalty, lack of esprit de corps, and suffer
accordingly both from those in power and his
friends.

Consequently, to be on the safe side, an editor
of a school magazine permits of nothing but
accounts of games, concerts, field days, dramatic
performances, debates, letters from the Front,
and a harmless verse or so, translated from the

94

THE OFFICIAL ORGAN 95

Greek, with the result that the finished number
is so tedious as to bore every one to tears except
the smaller fry and the ambitious, who rush to
see their names in print as having distinguished
themselves on the field of play or on the
platform.

Were it not part of the school's laws that
every boy perforce has to subscribe sixpence per
number towards the production of these peri-
odicals, most of them would have ceased to
exist through lack of funds shortly after their
inception. Old Boys, masters, and present
Winchburians alike always complain as each
number appears that it is only duller than the
last.

Once having satisfied themselves that their
names do or do not appear, their interest vanishes
at once.

And it should in fairness be understood at
once that it is not for lack of talent that these
journals fail ; in every school there are many
really brilliant writers who never even approach
the editor with their MSS., knowing full well
that unless they say what is trite and
commonplace their " stuff " stands no chance
of acceptance.

It is in consequence of this that enthusiastic
waves of literary endeavour from time to time
take place, and for a short space of time really
brilliant ephemeral periodicals flit into our ken,
only to disappear all too soon.

These secret, short-lived bursts are sometimes
astonishingly full of genius, and after all who

96 SCHOOL MAGAZINES

can wonder? These are those illegitimate ex-
pressions of a boy's soul —

" Which in the lusty stealth of Nature, take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth ... go to the creating of a whole tribe of

' mags '
Got 'tween asleep and wake ! "

I remember in my own schooldays that as a
counter-attraction to the official Crantonian we
ran a rival called The Critic. This magazine,
which was illustrated and uncensored, was read
aloud fortnightly on alternate Sunday evenings
to the delighted members of a club called the
Junior Debating Society. There was but one
copy, and the editor was a boy of fine literary
taste. We criticised everything — masters, pre-
fects, customs, games, abuses — with a freedom that
has been denied us ever since in a world where
the law of libel holds us up at every turn ; never
again have any of us been allowed to say exactly
what we mean or to indulge in such sharp,
biting, vituperative language. We boldly copied
Swift and Pope, Byron and Dryden ; our coup-
lets and epigrams were bandied about from
month to month for terms ; we felt ourselves
among the immortals ; we were coiners of
phrases which outlasted our time ; we invented
nicknames that still stick, twenty years after.
What greater fame could man desire ?

And still can we con with delight our own
unformed writing if we choose to go back to
Cranton and poke about in the archives of the

THE WASP 97

Junior Debating Society Library, for every copy
of The Critic was kept and bound. . . .

The secret of our success ? No censor, no
dread of public opinion. All contributions were
anonymous ; also, most important of all, we
were paid according to merit. The pride that
thrills a boy on first receiving a piece of silver,
ay, even sometimes of gold, for his own writing
is finer than any other sensation in life.

Since those days I have had to act as con-
tributor, reader, censor, and editor to many
magazines, but I have never met with truer self-
expression, better satire, or such good-humoured
chaff as in those old days of The Critic.

I remember once in later years that a certain
house noted for its tendency towards literary
expression at Harchester started a rival to the
Harcastrian called The Wasp. Its first and last
editor was a boy-poet who is now among the
more famous of the younger school of Georgian
poets. It was an amazing tour de force. The
editor wrote practically the whole magazine from
cover to cover. It was typed and cost sixpence a
copy. There were plays in blank verse modelled
on Stephen Phillips, passionate love-poems obvi-
ously based on Ernest Dowson and Swinburne,
attacks on stereotyped religions, forms, and
ceremonies, gems of fairy poetry distinctly
reminiscent of Walter de la Mare, fantastic stories
of mystery and imagination founded on Richard
Middleton and Edgar Allan Poe, long narrative
poems full of obscenities showing the influence
of " The Everlasting Mercy " and " The Widow

98 SCHOOL MAGAZINES

in the Bye-Street " — all the great writers of
yesterday and to-day were exploited ruthlessly
to provide copy for their disciples at Harchester.
The strange part of the whole magazine was
that there was never a word about the school ;
no attempt at abuse, no scurrilous condemna-
tion of the Harcastrian, no flighty satire about
masters' ways, masters' dress, masters' incom-
petence.

I think it was this very aloofness that so
irritated the headmaster when once, by chance,
he happened to see a copy.

Full of rage, he sent for the editor ; he de-
manded that all copies should be burnt, and was
only prevented from instantly expelling the
unfortunate editor after a stand-up fight with
the boy's housemaster. He could not see that
this self-expression was not " immoral," as he
stigmatised it, at all, but rather was a very
powerful safety-valve for the outpouring of the
emotions of a few highly-strung boys who
craved for something more than they found in
the hide-bound routine and monotony of school
life.

I have kept all copies of The Wasp. Some
day the world will probably thank me for having
done so, to judge from the way in which young
J A 's later work is now selling.

I have before me now two new productions of
two separate cliques at Winchborough.

The one, The Castigator, costs threepence, is
advertised to appear monthly, and is badly
printed off from the Army Side master's

THE CAST1GAT0R 99

"jellygraph" at infinite cost of trouble and
time.

It is a strange periodical.

It opens with a sonnet which I cannot forbear
from quoting ; it shows the new spirit, brought
about by the war, at work, and is most distinctly
poetry.

"THE CALL

' Lusimus satis : tempus est abire '

As the spring morn casts off its winter raiment
So put we by the garb that we have worn :
Draggled through many wanderings, and torn

By passions that demand their bitter payment

Of the Gods' golden gift of Youth and Love.
Now stand we strong of heart and clear of eye
And they remain only in memory, —

Those fevered days that now seem so far off.

For the word England like a flame was breathed,
And we forgot the old desires and joys,
The barren ecstasies and clamouring noise
Of pleasure. Then with penitential awe
Mingled with proud thanksgiving, our eyes saw

The sword of Honour and The Faith unsheathed."

So fine a start is, naturally enough, not sus-
tained ; that were too much to expect.

The editorial, like nearly all editorials, is poor ;
its only merit is its brevity. It is stilted and
self-conscious ; altogether too boyish.

Then follows " News of the House," which is, of
course, of local interest, and panders to that
taste which likes to see its name in print, even
in '*■ jellygraph " print, and this is succeeded b}r
an extraordinary story about China which would
8

ioo SCHOOL MAGAZINES

not disgrace the pen of such an authority as Mr .
J.O. P. Bland.

After this we are prepared for anything. We
are not surprised to find a serial not unlike those
of Miss Ruby M. Ayres, which The Times chooses
to boom so freely for its sister, the Daily Mirror ;
there is the inevitable ghost story, some bad
verses on a school abuse, a vast quantity
of quite amusing correspondence, a series of
" howlers " committed by members of the house
in form (a gorgeous page of self-revelations), and
the fourteenth page sees the last of "No. i,
Vol. I."

All success to it, say I ; this is what we
want.

I have before me the first copy of a new
Winchburian production, printed by the local
photographer, called The Clarion, price 2d.
Let me say at once that it is by far the best school
magazine I have ever seen. It is conducted in
absolute secrecy, even to the point of being
delivered in a sealed envelope. It contains
nothing which could possibly betray the author-
ship of any one contribution.

On the first page we read that :

M The Clarion is the first innovation here
for years, and perhaps the only thing at Winch-
borough which is not compulsory."

Later :

'• One of the many merits of The Clarion is
that it contains no articles on public schools
in war-time."

Later again :

THE CLARION 101

" Do not imagine that The Clarion is pro-
duced by masters — it is far too clever.

" It has no tales of classic fights

By military nuts ;
No deft debaters wronging rights,
No rising to poetic heights,
No lays of literary lights,

Or chronicles of ' guts.' "

There follows an extremely able " hit " at
the " Bloods," called " Etiquette in the Upper
Circle." One of the most bitter rules for
candidates is No. 3 :

11 Candidates must be careful to avoid all
important questions when conversing. Con-
versation should be confined to games, the
weather, and the work you haven't done, and
should always be of a light and humorous char-
acter when not abusive."

A real sense of poetry is reached in " The
Wood," which begins :

" At the shadowed hour of midnight, in the dark-leaved

forest reaches,
When the lonely little moonbeams flicker struggling

through the beeches,
When the tiny, mournful breezes with a moaning and a

sighing
Through the swaying, whispering branches come

a-creaking and a-crying . . .
Then the wicked little people of the forest are a-gadding,
With their little eyes a-twinkle and their little feet

a-padding."

This is followed up by some remarkably
apposite correspondence in which a plea for

102 SCHOOL MAGAZINES

less extravagant energy in games is put forward
" now that the school is in a better condition,
morally and socially, than it has ever been
before."

An unmerciful parody of the first four pages
of the current number of The Winchburian
paves the way for the bon-mot of the number.

This is a jest almost too good to be true. The
editor of The Winchburian one day received a
letter purporting to emanate from an old boy,
R. E. Mydleton, who desired to print two sonnets
in the forthcoming issue. The editor replied
that he was unable to accede to this request
unless Mr. Mydleton would specify exactly
when he was at Winchborough. This the
author, in his reply, stated that he was unable
to do as he had changed his name, and dare not
disclose a secret which would cause pain to
one who was dear to him. The editor, in re-
morse, agreed to print the sonnets, and wrote
a most touching letter of apology for his first
harsh note. Judge of his horror when he dis-
covered that on the very day that he received
the second letter from Mr. Mydleton, that un-
fortunate poet had died. In the Daily Mail of
13th November 191 5 appeared this obituary
notice :

11 Mydleton. — Very suddenly, on Wednesday
evening, at Cambridge Square, Hyde Park,
Ralph E. Mydleton, the poet, aged fifty-one."

Of course the whole thing was a hoax. The
sonnets, which incidentally had appeared already
in The Winchburian a short time before, were

THE MYDLETON HOAX 103

ridiculously bad ; there never had been a Mr.
Mydleton — and the editor of The Winchburian
is now like the immortal Partridge of almanack
fame in Swift's day, the butt of inextinguishable
laughter.

The Clarion publishes the whole corre-
spondence and somewhat naturally gloats over
its unfortunate contemporary.

" And so," runs the indictment, " the editor
of The Winchburian believes that by refusing
to accept Mr. Mydleton 's sonnets he has made
himself the virtual murderer of this unfortunate
and mysterious contributor."

Such a " scoop " for the opening number of
a school magazine it would be hard to rival.
It stands alone among the schoolboy jests of
our time.

Long may The Clarion and its kind flourish.
Led by such a spirit of literary adventure its
contributors are well on the way to train them-
selves to become writers who will really matter
in the next generation, and we sadly need
a training-school for the young journalist before
he casts off the fetters of discipline which Winch-
borough and other such places so beneficially
provide for the genius of to-morrow.

CHAPTER XIII

GAMES

One of the greatest benefits which the war has
conferred upon us is the depreciation of the
value of athletics consequent upon the rise of
the corps.

We were in grave danger of falling into the
snare of making success in the games one of the
first standards by which we judged our fellow-
men. A " Blue " was always safe to be offered
a post at most public schools, regardless of his
qualities as a master. The theory was that boys
would naturally reverence a man who had the
magic gift of a straight eye or an abnormal wind.

As a matter of fact, boys were not so easily
hoodwinked. Some of the worst masters we
have ever known have been " Blues " — men
without brains, without a sense of humour
or proportion, with no sense of dignity or dis-
cipline, useless in every walk of life except on
the running track or on the river.

Our daily papers did their best to lend colour
to the fact that England's gods were her pro-
fessional cricket and football players by giving
up whole pages to accounts of games all over

the country.

X04

PAST AND PRESENT 105

War has changed all that. We still play
games, but we play them, not work at them
now. But two years ago and every game seemed
to be degenerating into a science which required
years of incessant and arduous practice. The
whole point of a game is that it should be
relaxation. To play hard is one thing, to play
in such a state of nervous tension that you go
" stale " in half a term is another — and tends
to ruin all the good that undoubtedly accrues
from healthy exercise.

There was a time, not long ago, when boys
could be got to talk of nothing else but their
chances of getting caps, the chances of their
houses in the cup-ties, the probable choices for
the first and second Fifteens and Elevens. That
talk has now luckity been diverted into a healthier
channel ; the O.T.C. takes up much more of
their time and occupies their thoughts, to the
partial exclusion of games. But still games are
played, and there is a tendency as the war goes
on to revert to the old false values.

Boys come tired out and listless into afternoon
school after a strenuous practice, and for all
the good they derive from the lesson might
as well be asleep in their studies.

The truth is, that even now the average boy
is driven too much ; every one knows that it is
bad for the young to have too much time to
himself, but I am not sure that it is not an equally
bad thing for him to have no time to himself.
From bed he is hurried to physical training,
from physical training to breakfast, from break-

106 GAMES

fast to chapel, and then to work for four hours
on end, which may be, in a slack form, his only
rest for the day. As soon as he comes out of
school he is drilled in the O.T.C., a hurried
lunch is followed by a scramble into football
clothes, and he is hounded up and down the
fields for an hour by his house captain under
pretence of being kept fit. Back he goes to his
house with just time to change before afternoon
school ; by the time that 6.15 comes he is
ready to drop through sheer fatigue. Tea is
followed at once by preparation, supper and
more preparation, and at ten o'clock he is rushed
to bed, having had no instant to himself since
he got up in the early morning.

Now a " slack " afternoon every now and
again would just be the saving of him. Every
boy ought to be allowed two afternoons in
the week " off" games, when he should be per-
mitted to go off on his bicycle, walk, play golf,
slack in his study, or do whatever he pleased
to counteract the effect of the other days.
Only so can games be made the pleasurable
relaxation which they were meant to be. There
is too much giving of colours and choosing of
sides, too much excitement to go M all out " all
the time, day in, day out, throughout the term.
A day with beagles, a run to hounds once every
fortnight would do everybody a world of good.
It would take them out of the narrow routine,
they would meet fresh people, see fresh scenes,
become, as all lovers of the hunt become, lovers
of nature.

GOOD QUALITIES OF GAMES 107

There is a section of society which looks ask-
ance at boys daring to go down to the playing-
fields in football garb at all ; they say that it
shows a levity sadly out of place at a time when
all the nation's energies should be expended on
one object alone — the conquest of the enemy
by whatever means .

Such people forget, what all unthinking op-
ponents of games forget, that if you are to train
a man for any post of intellectual or moral
responsibility you must keep him physically fit,
and that 3'ou can do this in no better way than
by encouraging him to play in games that en-
courage the team spirit.

Most of the qualities that make for the good
soldier are learnt in the games ; courage,
self-reliance, quickness to seize the initiative,
calm determination to do one's best whatever
the issue : all these are taught quicker and more
effectively on the cricket and football field than
anywhere else.

It is only when these things are treated as
a fetish that games fail. It is all a question
of firjSev ayav. Scarcely any boy ever over-
works,— no boy knows how to, — whereas nearly
every boy overplays, and in addition to the
resulting loss of balance in his mind he usually
overstrains some organ of his body which may
render him physically useless at twenty-five.
What else can you expect after witnessing even
a Junior House match ? You have never seen
one ? Let me try and depict one for you.

Imagine a filthy afternoon in mid-February,

108 GAMES

a wild waste of mud-flats, four hundred boys
in corps boots, heavy overcoats, mufflers, and
(strange incongruity) straw hats, slowly filtering
past a gaunt, elderly pedagogue who snappishly
calls over the roll from a little blue book which,
by the time he reaches the Lower School, is
saturated with rain and mud.

A mad scamper follows to the lower grounds
where the first round of the Juniors is to be
played to-day. For weeks each side has been
training down to the last hair — getting up at
unholy hours in the early morning, refusing all
invitations to tea from kindly masters' wives
(who are all unwitting of the temptation they
offer by their untimely advances), meticulously
careful about their diet in Hall, eschewing all
sweet-stuffs and potatoes, all fat-forming
material that comes their way. Here they
are at last brought to the test, all nervous,
uttering the most inane remarks to any one
who will listen, in a manner quite foreign to
them.

The referee whistles : blazers, sweaters, and
caps of honour are discarded, and the teams
take the field, each individual unconsciously
deploring his lack of muscle and inches when
compared with any of the opposing side, who
seem to have grown immense in the night.
They line up ; a hand is held up aloft, the ball
is kicked away down the ground, a frenzied
mel£e ensues — the match has begun. Wild
cheers from the spectators for " Raleigh's " or
" Bradley's " cease not now for eighty minutes,

A HOUSE MATCH 109

except for breathing-space at half-time. Here
are collected Yeomanry officers, masters and
their wives, local tradespeople and day boys'
parents, and some few strangers interspersed
among the wild horde of boys who race violently
up and down the touch-line imploring their
House to " use your feet, fee-eet — fee-eet — man,

fee-eet " " Pass threes, pass, can't you? "

" Well played, laddies ! Well played, boys ! " —
this in a frenzied tone from one of the house-
masters who, clad in white shorts and stockings
and an old Cambridge blazer, is tearing up and
down the field, megaphone to his mouth, for all
the world like a river " coach " on the banks by
Long Bridges. The other housemaster interested
is lean, taciturn, and aged ; neatly dressed in
bowler hat and a brown suit, he stands cynically
surveying the scene from behind the goal-post,
saying to himself in a continued undertone,
"Good old House 1 Well played, House!"
But aloud, when any one ventures to approach
him, will veer away from the match altogether
and discuss the lights on the trees over Honey-
mead or Crowcombe Hill.

This particular match to-day seems to be of
an extraordinary character, for Raleigh's, with
only thirteen men, lead at half-time (mainly
owing to the exertions of their gesticulating
housemaster, it is true) by 14 points to nil ;
in the second " half," however, their weakness
in numbers tells — gradually the points are piled
up until the score rises, amidst maddening
excitement, to 14 points all. Immediately after,

no GAMES

the whistle blows " No side." " Will they
play on? "

The captains of the respective houses confer —
Raleigh's chieftain most emphatically declining
to hear of any more to-day. With his thirteen
men he is onty too glad to have made a tie of it.
11 We'll replay next week."

The manager of school games wanders up to
the circle where the argument waxes hot and
furious, and informs them that they must play
on, five minutes each way. The teams look
at each other, every man piteously wondering
how soon it will be before he faints ; the strain
has already bereft him of all strength or thoughts.
Somehow they hang on, scarcely moving in the
mud and slime : half-time, no score ; another
age-long five minutes, and still no score — Over,
thank God ! for the day. And so the concourse
breaks up, only to fight the entire match over
again in Common Room, in the tuck shop, in
the studies, to dissent from the games manager's
decision, to rebel against that last try which
the referee allowed, to describe momentary
gleams of greatness, to dilate on the rottenness of
Bradley's " halves," and so on ; while the poor,
unfortunate players simply go on training,
waiting more nervous than ever for the replay
of this titanic struggle.

This is not how we would have our games
travestied : I have said enough. Now is the
time, before professionalism becomes paramount,
to eradicate for ever any taint of professionalism
in our schools.

CHAPTER XIV

THE TEMPORARY MASTER

This is an age in which all education stands a
good chance of being neglected altogether ; on
the one hand, we hear of salaries being docked
in the elementary schools just at a time when
it is becoming increasingly hard for a teacher
to afford even the bare necessaries of
life, and impossible for him to meet the new
taxation ; on the other hand, screamers in
every paper, who are busying themselves trying
to stop every industry and profession in order
that men may be found fit to fight, have been
querulously asking why education is permitted
to go on : What good does it do ? What return
do we see for our money ?

The public schools have wonderfully settled
down to work under war conditions ; deprived
of all their more responsible elder boys the
younger ones have stepped into the breach, and
are acquitting themselves splendidly as heads
of houses, captains of games, presidents of
societies, and prefects of school ; work, games,
the O.T.C., every department of school life is
not only keeping up its old tradition of efficiency,
but steadily improving on the old standards.

ii2 THE TEMPORARY MASTER

Perhaps the place where we have suffered most
since the Christmas term of 1914 has been in the
ranks of the Common Room.

The older housemasters, of course, mountain-
like, remain steadfast ; but there has been sad
havoc wrought in the type of younger assistant
master .

We have lost all who were eligible for war,
and have had to reconstitute the staff as best we
could out of the stuff left on the agents' books.

First of all, we roped in all the very old men
who had given up work years ago, masters of
an age-long past, stern taskmasters, who asked
and gave no quarter, who knew, like Dr. John-
son, that all they had learnt had been beaten
into them with the cane.

Valiantly they responded to the call to come
and help ; they are still with us, men of decided
opinions, not only about " all this hotch-potch
of modern education which fits a boy to become
nothing better than a crossing-sweeper," but
who openly deride their younger (and, inci-
dentally, senior) colleagues on their attitude
towards, and relationships with, the boys under
their charge : " All this bridging of the chasm,
you know, it won't do — so much soft soap . . .
molly-coddling, favouritism, tut-tut . . . fallacy
of the elder brother . . . disgusting, effemin-
ate . . .," and so on.

Tolerantly we smile ; in secret we laugh at
these adherents of " the good old days " ; but no
one can say that we do not envy these men their
glorious self-possession, their amazing assur-

SOME TYPES 113

ance that they are indubitably right, while we
scatter like a bad pack of hounds after every sort
of scent in our frenzy to pick up the right trail
of that elusive fox, liberal education ; each of us
pioneer-like baying to high heaven that we and we
alone have found out the right path, inciting all
the other hounds to follow us in the pursuit, only
to lose all traces of our quarry at the first obstacle.

And yet in our heart of hearts we know that
we are right, that in spite of our dismal and
all too frequent failures we are more likely
to evolve a scheme of true education than
these stereotyped town-criers with their " Aut
classics (sic/) aut nihil " ever dreamed of. The
days of rigid movements in a fixed line are over ;
we of the twentieth century are as averse from
the very sound of the word " groove " as our
forefathers of the eighteenth were from " en-
thusiasm " ; if we cannot indulge in hyperbolic
flights we prefer not to move at all ; we become
barristers, not schoolmasters.

A second type of temporary master that the
war has called into being is the very young,
much-bespectacled, physically unfit, but intel-
lectually brilliant scholar. In normal times this
type would become a don immediately after
taking a degree ; but as " Othello's occupation's
gone," with regard to the nourishing of the mind
of the searcher after a " First in Greats," he has
to descend to the level of the black abysmal
ignorance of the Middle School. As a result he
is at first hopelessly lost ; his lessons are so
much above the heads of his hearers as to be

ii4 THE TEMPORARY MASTER

dubbed by them " bally hot-air," " the meander-
ings of a freak." . . . This type has to learn
that the public school boy does not wish to
improve ; his first object is to make out of
what stuff his " beaks " are made. If, in his
anxiety to impress on the soul of youth the im-
portance of and lasting benefits that accrue
from hard work, he forgets that he has first
to insist on the strictest discipline, he is lost,
irrecoverably lost.

There are many good honest souls who would
have us believe that, because there is a war on,
boys are no longer boys ; that they have suddenly
become quietened, chastened, angelic. No
bigger mistake could possibly be made. The
youth of to-da}' is just as willing to take advan-
tage of weakness, either in the new, nervous
weakling in his house, whom he bullies with
as much gusto as ever, or in the type of master
which I have just depicted. Ink is still upset
down the backs of unfortunate new boys in the
classrooms of such men ; paper is still thrown
gloriously about the form in sheer abandon-
ment of spirits, while careful geometrical figures
are being drawn on the board by " the char "
(I should explain that all temporary " ushers "
are politely included in one comprehensive,
expressive phrase : " The Chars ") ; hideous
noises of groaning, cheers, hisses, stampings of
feet, explosions, ghastly smells, live animals,
and so on, still emanate from the classrooms
where these men are supposed to be teaching.
It is all very tragic, albeit very natural.

WANTED— MORE MEN 115

Here are men only too willing to give of their
best to do their country service, refused the
privilege of taking up arms for the cause, who
turn to education, knowing full well how im-
portant it is that the youth of to-day should be
well served in the present crisis ; men, full of
culture and ideas, only too anxious to propagate
their learning and perpetuate their theories of
an ideal state, who find themselves, instead
of seeing their castles in the air materialise
before their eyes, confronted by brute beasts
in the mass, hungry for their blood, caring
nothing whatever for ideals and sound learning,
on the look out only for a slip on the part of the
master that they may roar, get out of hand,
and convert themselves into a set of unmanage-
able pigs, lowest of breathing animals. How I
should like to bring down some of those men
who think that the public schools can be run
by any type of man while its finest and best
spirits are liberated to fight in Flanders or the
Dardanelles, to see a school in the working
under its present grievous handicap !

They would talk no more of that sort of cant
which we too frequently hear, that " any sort
of ass can be a successful schoolmaster."

We, as a race, have been maligned too long ;
we have borne only too patiently the affronts of
men of letters who ought to have known the
truth. Kipling and his betters have all kicked
us to gain popularity : we want no man's
praises, but we sometimes sigh for justice.

The art of teaching is not one that can be
9

u6 THE TEMPORARY MASTER

learnt in a day : sestheticism, brain-power,
idealism, passionate fervour alone count for
nothing ; a man must be able to handle boys
before he can teach them anything.

A third class of master, a direct product of
the war, now swims into our ken — the wounded
hero. Armless, legless, disabled permanently as
a soldier, such a man may yet make a magni-
ficent schoolmaster.

To begin with, he has an overwhelming
advantage over all other men from the very
start. Boys quite naturally reverence a man
who has actually been face to face with death
and narrowly missed it. Such a man will have
already been practised in the art of discipline ;
having handled men, he ought to be able, unless
he is a prodigious fool, to handle boys without
difficulty . Having endured the horrors of war,
he will, to use a phrase of Carlyle's, have cleared
his mind of cant, and as a consequence have much
to say on the conduct of life which boys will
believe all the more readily when they see from
his face that his statements are no mere common-
places of doctrine, but fundamental facts learnt
only by dreadful experience ; his theories,
having been purified seven times in the fire, will
carry an air of verisimilitude which is only too
often lacking in the theories which we attempt
to impose on the youthful mind.

Particularly in the teaching of history, English
literature, and the classics, will such men be
found of great use ; for no one is quicker to
detect insincerity in writing or quicker to gain

THE CHANCE OF THE DISABLED 117

inspiration from real genius than the schoolboy
when properly trained, and the soldier who has
undergone the baptism of fire. The one will
react upon the other ; the soldier will fix upon
those passages in the works of the great masters
which most helped him in the hour of need, and
will impress upon his form the lifelong satis-
faction and solace that are to be derived from
such sources, if only they are read with the
imaginative faculties sharpened, and ready to
absorb their benign influences.

The help that such men can render in the
training of the Officers' Training Corps is so
obvious as to need no comment.

There seems to be much talk about the future
of many of our wounded officers who will, owing
to the severity of their wounds, be unable to
pursue the vocations which knew them before
the war.

Surely here is a solution. Even now every
school in the land is crying out for masters,
temporary in many cases ; but that word
" temporary " now will mean in only too many
schools " permanent," for how few of our soldier-
schoolmasters will ever come back alive gives us
furiously to think. The usual supply annually
taken from the universities has now absolutely
dried up. As a consequence, men are now
taking two, three, four times the number of
boys, and doing two, three, four times as much
work as they did before the war. They must
have relief if education matters at all.

Here is the chance of the permanently disabled

u8 THE TEMPORARY MASTER

officer : he need not think that his life is at an
end because he has lost an arm or a leg. Let
him come to us and take his share in forming
the opinions and shaping the character of the
England of to-morrow ; it is no light job ; it is
an intensely patriotic and important one.

Life is going to be none too easy for the youth
of to-day when it grows up to be the man of
to-morrow. There are going to be problems to
be solved which will call for the best-developed
brains, the highest moral qualities, a steadfast-
ness of aim and immobility of purpose that need
cultivating at once if they are to be achieved .

Your fight is not yet over, O soldier-hero !
Come once more into the lists ; your physical
battles have made you finer men than we are ;
come among us and share the spiritual conflict,
so that when old age comes upon us, and we
are about to die, both of us may look back
on the past years and say : " According to our
lights we did our best : the England of to-day
is better than the England of yesterday ; this
we helped to bring about ; our lives have not
been entirely purposeless."

CHAPTER XV

THE HOLIDAY TASK

I suppose that the words " Holiday Tasks "
never connoted any such real, living, serious
work as they do now. In the past we inevitably
conjured up visions of books to be read, notes to
be taken, exercises to be worked out, and so on.

Now we are one and all intent upon spending
ourselves to the full, not in revising ^schylus
and Sophocles, Taylor's theorem or mediaeval
European history, but in manual labour, in
military work, in helping, so far as in us ltes, to
carry on the work of the country wherever we
may be found useful.

Nor is it the schoolboy alone who is devoting
himself voluntarily to the new kind of holiday
task ; the masters, too, in their own particular
ways, are giving up their much-longed-for weeks
of rest in order to be of some service to the nation.

Elderly priests are taking parish work in Scot-
land or the Lakes in order to set free younger
clergymen who wish to make munitions or
indulge in other forms of active service.

The music masters are bound for Y.M.C.A.
tents in military centres where their vocal and
musical faculties generally are only too sorely

120 THE HOLIDAY TASK

needed ; housemasters with big families are
going en masse to take over farms in Suffolk,
Kent, Devon, and Cornwall, so that they may
assist in the harvest and general farm work
for seven weeks ; senior officers in the O.T.C.,
captains and majors, are drafted into regiments
where they can train the newer subalterns ; the
junior officers are willing to undertake the in-
struction of Kitchener's Third Line of Home
Defence, for two months to go through all the
drudgery of squad and platoon drill in which they
are so adequately versed here at school. Less
agile and less physically fit members of the staff
have signed on as army workers in London, South-
ampton, Edinburgh, Inverness, outlying villages
in Wales, and thickly congested districts of
Lancashire.

Others, again, who wish to prove how muscular
their bodies are, and to what extent their powers
of endurance can last, have applied successfully
for jobs in mines, or as goods porters on all the
principal railways ; scientists have been per-
mitted to tackle intricate pieces of engineering,
while the more sedentary have been selected for
clerical work connected with the Red Cross
Inquiry as to the whereabouts of missing soldiers,
expressing their willingness to be sent from
hospital to hospital all over the kingdom in
their search, or to sit in an office day after day
and write letters to anxious relatives with
regard to whatever information they have
gleaned from wounded friends about their miss-
ing loved ones.

SOME ACTIVITIES 121

The elder boys, of course, are only too de-
lighted now that the fetters of school are loosened
and their age has advanced to the limit required
for commissions in the Army. After a year
of chafing, their delight at being at last allowed
to do something is unbounded. Their quite
natural and usually overpowering sorrow at
leaving school and the friends of years is now
more than counterbalanced by the splendid
anticipation of immediate military activity.

Looking through the school list, it would
appear at first sight that no boy worth counting
was coming back next term ; but that thought
oppresses us regularly every year at this time,
war or no war, so that goes for nothing. Those
returning, as a matter of fact, include many
quite elderly boys who are unable, through
physical defects, to enter the Army.

Of these many are now employed as sergeants
or corporals on the East Coast ; they are living
in tents on the same fare as the ordinary soldier,
and are acting as sergeant-instructors, and
marvellously well are they acquitting themselves
in these posts, though they are of no light
responsibility.

I even know of some sixteen-year-olds who
have prevailed upon their patriotic parents to
permit them to spend the summer at Hendon,
where they may learn the rudiments of flying,
so that next }rear they may enter the Royal
Flying Corps, the Ultima Thule of every young
boy's ambitions.

What a difference war has made in these, our

122 THE HOLIDAY TASK

self-imposed holiday tasks ! Somehow we no
longer talk of books, and yet just as many are
packed, just as many are taken away, just as
many are read — yes, read, but in how different
a spirit from formerly ! Both boys and masters
will be reading these holidays — just as deep
and abstruse literature as ever, but how much
more carefully, with how much more zest and
interest .

After a hard day's route march, or gathering in
of corn, or of coal-heaving, or of tackling any job
of national importance, how infinitely greater and
more instant will be the appeal of the majestic
Greek poet, of the English playwright, or of the
philosopher ! What a welcome change will be
the delicate mathematical problem, the analysing
of that chemical compound !

The admixture of bodily energy with intel-
lectual effort will make these holidays for ever
after a precious memory, physique and brain
will each receive an added stimulus, and, more
important than all, think how the moral side of
each of us is likely to be affected.

Think of the example we are setting to
those with whom we are now brought into
contact — the professional coal-heavers, the
regular goods porter, the farm-hand, the city
clerk, the soldiers, whether in tent or canteen.
We of the public schools have held only too
long aloof from the life of the country. Now,
through the agency of war, will the Cavendish
Association be able to point to us and say, " Did
I not always tell you so? Does not salva-

THE RESULT 123

tion come through Personal, Social, Christian
Service? " The mingling of all classes in this
common endeavour will make for a better
understanding between classes, will go a long
way to remove all that bitterness of feeling which
arises from suspicion and lack of knowledge of the
aims of other strata of society than our own.

The public school boy will no longer sneer
at his less fortunate companion of the streets ;
the illiberally educated will no longer hate the
supercilious superiority, no longer shrink under
the contempt of the richer, the more intellectual,
the nobler born among his countrymen.

England is on the right path ; we need not
fear for her future. Still shall we be able to
boast with Wordsworth, " In everything we are
sprung Of Earth's first blood, have titles mani-
fold " ; ay, and bear it in mind as a motto to
live up to, so that in the years to come we may
look back on this difficult era as a time when
we first recognised this truth and, owing to God's
grace, did nothing to tarnish England's good
name, but rather, in so far as we were able,
consummated our ambition of bringing men
nearer to each other and nearer to God.

The above chapter was written immediately
before one such " war holiday," hence the use of
the present and future tenses.

CHAPTER XVI
GALLERY OF SCHOOLMASTERS

"... a time, sixty summers ago,
When, a young, chubby chap, I sat just so
With others on a school-form rank'd in a row,
With intelligences agape and eyes aglow,
While an authoritative old wiseacre
Stood over us, and from a desk fed us with flies.

A dry biped he was, nurtured likewise
On skins and skeletons, stale from top to toe
With all manner of rubbish and all manner of lies."

Robert Bridges.

Not long ago I received an invitation to attend
a meeting of a celebrated Literary Society at
one of our great public schools where a
paper was read on " The Schoolmaster in
Literature," during the course of which the
reader remarked that it was a curious and very-
unpleasant coincidence that all authors had,
through all the ages, combined in a sort of
conspiracy to malign and caricature a noble
profession. This set me thinking, and first I
must say bluntly that I am in this instance at
any rate a believer in the well-worn adage,
that " Where there is smoke fire cannot be far
distant." A certain substratum of truth under-

FULLER ON SCHOOLMASTERS 125

lies all that the literary lights of our land have
to say concerning the pedagogue, and it is un-
deniable that not only in fiction but in real
life people instinctively avoid the society of
schoolmasters, however charming they may be,
at least for a little. There is a distinct aversion
to be conquered in the minds of most men
before they will take the members of this
profession to their bosoms.

There is, however, a theory that I wish to
promulgate : it is that the geniuses of letters
have not in the past been so wrong as the present-
day schoolmaster would like to think. Thomas
Fuller, in The Holy State and the Profane State,
has some illuminating comments on the school-
master of his time :

" There is scarce any profession in the
Commonwealth more necessary which is so
slightly performed. The reasons whereof I
conceive to be these : First, Young scholars
make this calling their refuge ; yea, perchance,
before they have taken any degree in the Uni-
versity, commence schoolmasters in the country,
as if nothing else were required to set up this
profession but only a rod and a ferula. Secondly,
Others who are able, use it only as a passage to
better preferment, to patch the rents in their
present fortune, till they can provide a new one,
and betake themselves to some more gainful
calling. Thirdly, They are disheartened from
doing their best with the miserable reward
which in some places they receive, being masters
to the children, and slaves to the parents.

126 A GALLERY OF SCHOOLMASTERS

Fourthly, Being grown rich, they grow negligent,
and scorn to touch the school but by the proxy
of the usher. But see how well our (fictitious)
schoolmaster behaves himself.

M i. His genius inclines him with delight to his
profession.

"2. He studieth his scholars' natures as care-
fully as they their books, and separateth them
into these divisions :

" (a) Those that are ingenious and industri-
ous. Such natures he useth with all
gentleness.
" (b) Those that are ingenious and idle. Oh !
a good rod will finely take them
napping.
11 (c) Those that are dull and diligent. That
schoolmaster deserves to be beaten
himself who beats nature in a boy
for a fault.
11 (d) Those that are invincibly dull and
negligent also. Such boys he con-
signeth over to other professions.
Those may make excellent merchants
and mechanics which will not serve
for scholars."
The man who calls negroes " images of God
cut in ebony," will not make a mistake through
lack of sympathy when he describes the school-
masters of his age ; so we may be sure that
much of the above, which reads as if it were
written this year, will be found to be a correct
estimate of the mid - seventeenth - century
pedagogue.

DR. JOHNSON 127

Next to Fuller I would take Dr. Johnson, a
peculiarly valuable witness, for he suffered both
as a boy from other masters, and as a man from
inside experience. For a time he was one of us.
Of one of his masters (Mr. Hunter of Lichfield) he
says : " He was very severe, and wrong-headedly
severe. He used to beat us unmercifully ; and
he did not distinguish between ignorance and
negligence, for he would beat a boy equally for
not knowing a thing, as for neglecting to know
it. He would ask a boy a question, and if he did
not answer it, he would beat him, without con-
sidering whether he had an opportunity of
knowing how to answer it. For instance, he
would call up a boy and ask him Latin for a
candlestick, which the boy could not expect
to be asked. Now, sir, if a boy could answer
every question, there would be no need of a
master to teach him." As a matter of fact,
he said later of the same man : " My master
whipt me very well. Without that, sir, I
should have done nothing."

When he was fifteen he went to Stourbridge,
and comparing his progress at the two schools
in after years, he said : " At one, I learned much
in the school, but little from the master : in
the other, I learned much from the master, but
little in the school." After he came down
from Oxford he was forced, owing to his extreme
penury, to accept a post as usher at Market
Bosworth School, an employment he exceedingly
disliked and complained of as being as M unvaried
as the note of the cuckoo " ; that he did not

128 A GALLERY OF SCHOOLMASTERS

know whether it was more disagreeable for him
to teach, or the boys to learn, the grammar
rules. He married soon afterwards and started
a private academy at Edial, near Lichfield. Of
his three pupils David Garrick was one. This
was given up after eighteen months.

It is, in passing, very strange to notice how
many of the world's geniuses have come up
against the world of school.

The necessary routine and rigid command
to " Conform or Go " of the public school
system has crushed the spirits of so many that
might have been great poets or painters if they
had been encouraged to develop their imagina-
tive faculties rather than to repress them, that
we cannot help feeling grateful to the great men
who have rebelled, as Johnson did, and given
to the world what was in danger of being lost
in a school.

Charles Lamb has two essays in which he
devotes his critical humour to a picture of
schoolmasters. The first, " Five and Thirty
Years Ago," deals with his own masters at
Christ's Hospital when he was a boy.

" Under the Rev. Matthew Field we lived a life
as careless as birds. We talked and did just
what we pleased, and nobody molested us. We
carried an accidence for form : there was now
and then the formality of saying a lesson, but
if you had not learned it, a brush across the
shoulders was the sole remonstrance. He came
among us now and then, but often staid away
whole days ; and when he came, it made no

CHARLES LAMB 129

difference to us — he had his private room to
retire to, to be out of the sound of our noise.

1 ' Boyer was a rabid pedant . His English style
was crampt to barbarisms. He had two wigs,
both pedantic, but of different omen. The one,
serene, smiling, fresh powdered, betokening a
mild day. The other, an old discoloured, un-
kempt, angry caxon, denoting frequent and
bloody excursion.

Nothing was more common than to see him
make a headlong entry from his inner recess, and
with turbulent eye, singling out a lad, roar out,
1 Od's my life, sirrah, I have a great mind to
whip you,' then, with as sudden a retracting
impulse, fling back into his lair — and after a
cooling lapse of some minutes drive headlong
out again with the expletory yell — ' and I will,
too ! ' "

The other essay of his on the subject is " The
Old and the New Schoolmaster," in which he
portrays the importunate questioning of the
pedagogue on the coach between Bishopsgate
and Shacklewell, the man full of information on
every subject except those of real interest.

" Had he asked of me what song the sirens
sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he
hid himself among women, I might, with Sir
Thomas Browne, have hazarded a ' wide
solution.'

Rest to the souls of those fine old pedagogues,
who, believing that all learning was contained
in the languages which they taught, and
despising every other acquirement as super-

130 A GALLERY OF SCHOOLMASTERS

ficial and useless, came to their task as to a
sport !

Revolving in a perpetual cycle of declensions,
conjugations, syntaxes, and prosodies, life must
have slipped from them at last like one day.
The fine dream is fading away fast. The modern
schoolmaster is expected to know a little of every-
thing, because his pupil is required not to be
entirely ignorant of anything. He must be
superficially omniscient.

The least part of what is expected from him
is to be done in school hours. He must seize
every occasion — the season of the year — the
time of the day — a passing cloud — a rainbow —
a waggon of hay — a regiment of soldiers going
by — to inculcate something useful. He must
interpret beauty into the picturesque. A boy
is at his board, and in his path, and in all his
movements. He is boy-rid, sick of perpetual
boy.

Why are we never quite at our ease in the
presence of a schoolmaster ? Because we know
that he is not quite at his ease in ours. He is
awkward, and out of place, in the society of his
equals. He comes like Gulliver from among his
little people, and he cannot fit the stature of
his understanding to yours. He is so used to
teaching that he wants to be teaching you. He
can no more let his intellect loose in society than
the clergyman can his inclinations. He is for-
lorn among his coevals : his juniors cannot be
his friends."

Can any unprejudiced reader seriously aver

HUGH WALPOLE 131

that " Elia " is unfair in his estimate of the pro-
fession ? Is there not more than a little of
truth in all that he has to say about them ? Un-
fortunate perhaps it may be, but the deficiencies
(and there must be some in every calling) are not
accentuated or aggravated : of all writers Lamb
may be taken as the fairest critic of a sadly mis-
judged race in the world of books.

I come now straight to the men of our own
day who have specialised in giving us the
master's point of view and idiosyncrasies rather
than, as in the case of Tom Brown's Schooldays ,
portray boy's life at school alone.

I propose to omit the whole nineteenth-century
school of writers from Eric to Stalky. They are
too well known already, and are all romantically
impossible and hopelessly out of date.

Rather would I push on to the first of the
younger school of present-day writers headed by
Mr. Walpole, who, for the first time in the history
of the school story, drew pictures of the master's
point of view rather than the boy's.

In Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill, one of the most
terrible books published in the twentieth
century, Mr. Hugh Walpole has presented once
and for all, as lightning flashes across our path,
showing a yawning chasm at our feet where
before we had in our blindness thought all safe,
the hideous pettiness and ghastly ruin of soul
and imagination and individuality that over-
take the schoolmaster who gets into the rut,
losing ambition, faith, hope, and charity. Were
it not that I myself have had to live the very
10

132 A GALLERY OF SCHOOLMASTERS

life depicted in this most magically real of
books, I should probably join the great band
of my profession who affect, albeit nervously, to
scorn the types here drawn. " Of course there
may be such schools as Moffatt's, but, thank God,
this is not like it," say they, whereas they know
in their heart of hearts that there is an almost
uncanny reality about the conversations, the
Common Room, the boys, and the whole deaden-
ing atmosphere ; only those who have suffered so
long as to be almost " soul-proof " can deny
with any satisfaction the truth of Mr. Walpole's
indictment.

We are first introduced to Mr. Perrin (who, I
may as well confess now, happens to be a friend
of mine) making good resolutions for the new
term.

" ' It shall be all right this term,' said Mr.
Perrin. He was long and gaunt ; his face might
have been considered strong had it not been
for a weak chin and a shaggy, unkempt mous-
tache. His hands were long and bony, his eyes
pale and watery, his age forty-five, and for
twenty years he had been a master at Moffatt's."

The other chief actor in the drama, Traill, is
described as " some one very young and very
eager to make friends. His hair, parted in the
middle and brushed back, was very light brown ;
his eyes were brown and his cheeks tanned. His
figure was square, his back very broad, his legs
rather short — he looked, beyond everything else,
tremendously clean. He had learnt at Cam-
bridge, above all things, one must not worry. His

MR. PERR1N AND MR. TRAILL 133

stay at Moffatt's was in the nature of an interlude :
in a term or two he hoped to return to his old
school, Clifton."

Of the others we glean a little at the masters'
meeting.

The Rev. Moy-Thompson, the headmaster —
a venerable looking clergyman — sat at the end
of the table in an impatient way, as though he
were longing for an excuse to fly into a temper.
There was a tough stout man, by name Comber,
once a famous football player, now engaged on a
book on Athletics in Greece, a man with a heavy
moustache and a sharp voice like a creaking door ;
a thin, bony little man with a wiry moustache
and a biting cynical speech that seemed to
goad Moy-Thompson to fury. There are others
drawn to type, not worth mentioning, but this
last man, Birkland bj' name (as Mr. Bradby
would say, there is a Birkland in every school), is
worth special mention because of a conversation
he holds with young Traill which gives one the
gist of Mr. Walpole's thesis. " Suddenly one
evening Birkland asked him to come and see him.
His room was untidy — littered with school books,
exercise books, stacks of paper to be corrected ;
but behind this curtain of discomfort there were
signs of other earlier things, some etchings, dusty
and uncared for sets of Meredith and Pater, and
a large engraving of Whistler's portrait of his
mother."

Birkland starts the conversation by warning
Traill to fly before the place seizes him, before it
is too late.

134 A GALLERY OF SCHOOLMASTERS

" There are thousands of these places all over
the country — places where the men are under-
paid, with no prospects, herded together, all of
them hating each other, wanting, perhaps,
towards the end of term, to cut each other's
throats. Do you suppose that that is good for
the boys they teach? Get out of it, Traill, you
fool ! You say, in a year's time. Don't I know
that ? Do you suppose that I meant to stay
here for ever when I came ? But one postpones
moving. Another term will be better, or you
try for a thing, fail, and get discouraged, and
then suddenly you are too old — too old at
thirty-three — earning £200 a year — too old I
and liable to be turned out if the Head doesn't
like you.

" You must not be friends with the boys,
because then we shall hate you and they will
despise you. You will be quite alone. You
think you are going to teach with freshness and
interest — you are full of eager plans, new ideas.
Every plan, every idea, will be killed immedi-
ately. It is murder — self-murder. You are going
to kill every fine thought, every hope that you
possess. You will never go anywhere because
you are neglecting your work. You have no
time. The holidays come, you go out into the
world to find you are different from all other
men. You are patronising, narrow, egotistic.
Then marriage — no money, no prospects,
starvation ! And gradually there creeps over
you a dreadful inertia — you do not care, 3rou
are a ghost."

THE SCHOOLMASTER'S DICTION 135

So much for Birkland. As I said, there
are Birklands in every school, and under
their bitter irony there runs a vein of
truth.

To return for a moment to Mr. Perrin :
his conversation is so like that of all other
schoolmasters in fiction that for the sake of
coincidence I must quote one characteristic
speech.

" I am afraid, friend Garden," he said, H that
it will devolve upon your lordship — hum-ha —
that you should write this poem of the noble
Mr. Robert Browning's no less than fifty times.
I grieve — I sympathise — I am your humble
servant ; but the law commands."

Do all of us, schoolmasters, talk like that ?
Writers seem to think we do, for they all unite
to put conversations in our mouths of a most
stilted, sarcastic, pedantic, unreal kind that I
for one have never heard used at all by any
member of any profession. I can quote no more,
partly because of the horror and depression
that grow on me as I read on, which I would
not willingly bestow on any other human being,
partly because I am convinced of the truth of
so much of what Mr. Walpole says that it would
be unfair to him to bring his thesis (which is a
very serious one) down into line with all the rest
of my authors. They never forget that their art
is to please and consequently are driven to draw
types, far removed in the main from the actual,
of a kind calculated to make their readers laugh
at the follies and pompous childishness of

1 36 A GALLERY OF SCHOOLMASTERS

schoolmasters. Mr. Walpole has no time for
laughter. He is far too serious for that.

But the book which above all others has
fluttered the dovecots of the scholastic
profession of late has been The Lanchester
Tradition, by the Rugby housemaster, Mr.
G. F. Bradby, who had already achieved a
most enviable reputation as the author of
When every Tree was Green, and Dick. This
book is a veritable mine for our purpose, so
much so that I must confine myself to a few
of the more important points, hoping that
every one interested in the subject will buy the
book for himself and see the most powerful
descriptions of public school masters in our
language. The story, to put it shortly, shows
how a certain school called Chiltern fared under
the regime of a headmaster (Mr. Flaggon) of
liberal opinions, and treats of his conflicts with
his assistant masters, notably one Chowdler,
the strong man of Chiltern.

"Mr. Chowdler owed his reputation for
strength, not to any breadth of view or depth
of sympathetic insight, but to a sublime un-
consciousness of his own limitations. Narrow
but concentrated, with an aggressive will and a
brusque intolerance of all who differed from
him, he was a fighter who loved fighting for
its own sake and who triumphed through the
sheer exhaustion of his enemies.

" A tall man, with broad shoulders, round bullet
head, thin sandy hair, and full lips, he caught
the eye in whatever company he might be.

THE LANCHESTER TRADITION 137

" Mr. Flaggon had come to Chiltern with a
determination to do great things for education.
He himself had had a hard struggle to win to
knowledge, and the phases of the struggle had
left their mark deeply imprinted on his character.
Born with a thirst for knowledge he had had to
force his way to the fountain-head, and the
narrow circumstances of a Cumberland vicarage
had strewn the path with difficulties.

" Rather below middle height, with a clear-cut
face and an intellectual forehead, his most
striking feature was his eyes — fearless, grey,
receptive eyes, which looked out on the world
with a quiet but penetrating interest.

" Of public schools he knew nothing from the
inside ; he had yet to learn how paralysing to
the intellectual life an assured future may be.
In a word, he did not yet understand the
psychology of the horse who refuses to drink
when taken to the water ; he knew what educa-
tion ought to be, but he had not yet become
acquainted with that particular breed of sheep
that is born without an appetite. But as he
mounted the Chiltern pulpit to deliver his first
sermon from the text, ' The letter killeth, but
the spirit maketh alive,' he felt conscious that
here were no hungry sheep looking up to be
fed, but indifference, inertia, and an unknown
something that was probably worse than either
and possibly the cause of both." To this
sermon Mr. Chowdler, who was, of course, in
orders, replied. " No mere layman could have
combined such a capacity for quarrelling with

1 38 A GALLERY OF SCHOOLMASTERS

so profound a conviction of his own reasonable-
ness and humility."

The next master on the staff worthy of com-
ment is Mr. Tipham, successor to a Mr. Cox
who had resigned on the arrival of Mr. Flaggon.

11 Mr. Tipham brought with him from Cleopas
College, Cambridge, two more or less fixed
ideas : first, that art consists in depicting dis-
agreeable things in a disagreeable way, and
secondly, that life in the twentieth century is
governed by two conflicting forces — convention,
which is always wrong, and nature, which is
always right. This theory had carried him not
only safely but brilliantly through his University
career. He had secured a first in both parts
of the Tripos ; he had played a prominent part
in the life of his own college and been quoted
outside it. He had worn strange clothes,
founded a literary society, and he had invented
a new savoury. His slightly tilted nose and
full cheeks gave him an air of confidence some-
times mistaken for conceit, while the long brown
hair, drawn back over the temples and plastered
down with fragrant oils, the orange tie and
loose green jacket, proclaimed that he was one
of those for whom art is not merely a hobby
but an integral part of life. He smoked as he
walked down to school from his lodgings and
refused even a perfunctory homage to age and
seniority. It was, indeed, soon evident that if
the serious purpose of his life was to teach
boys, his recreation consisted of shocking the
masters. He went by the name of the ' Super-

MESSRS. CHOWDLER AND BENT 139

Tramp ' among the boys. Needless to say,
his stay was brief." To return to Mr. Chowdler.

" When Mr. Chowdler 's house was competing
for laurels, Mr. Chowdler himself walked ex-
citedly up and down the touch-line with a
flushed face and protruding eyes, shouting in-
structions, such as, ' Pass, Percy, pass ! Feet,
feet, Gerald! Shoot, Basil, shoot, can't you?
Stick to it ! Good lads, all ! Well played,
Harry 1 well played, sir ! " As a coach he had
his limitations. For he had been brought up
on the Rugby game, and was never accepted
as an authority on the Chiltern game. Con-
sequently his instructions were invariably
ignored, but he continued to shout them in
perfect good faith, and they were regarded as
an inevitable, if irrelevant feature of the game."

By far the most amusing character on the
staff is Mr. Bent the cynic (every staff, says
the author, possesses a cynic).

He first comes into prominence at a bachelor
dinner-party held in honour of Mr. Tipham,
who arrived ten minutes late, clad in his usual
outlandish garb, M rather like a man who has
snatched up some clothes hurriedly to run to
the bathroom, than a guest at a dinner-party."

Most of the party had been discomfited by
this young man's preciosity.

" Mr. Bent had so far held himself in reserve,
profoundly annoyed yet watching with a certain
cynical enjoyment the growing irritation of
his colleagues. But when, shortly after, Mr.
Tipham laid it down as an axiom that Dorian

140 A GALLERY OF SCHOOLMASTERS

Grey was the greatest work of art that the
human intellect has ever produced, he saw his
opportunity and began in his best ironic vein :

14 It's refreshing to hear you say that ; so
few people ever venture nowadays to express
old - fashioned opinions, and the Victorians
seldom get justice done to them by the rising
generation. I am delighted to claim you as a
Victorian." Tipham was violently annoyed at
this, and raised his eyebrows and said coldly,
" How so? " "If one wants to be in the swim
nowadays," Bent continued, " one has to go
into ecstasies over de Barsac or Roger Filkison.
You read Roger Filkison, of course ? "

Mr. Tipham admitted, with some reluctance,
that he did not.

M Oh, he's the man, you know," replied Bent,
" who writes the testimonials for the liver and
kidney pills — the neo-realism they call it : very
clever and morbid."

Later Mr. Tipham unbent over the post-
impressionists and the masterly way in which
Grummer painted flesh with one stroke of a
glue-brush.

" I don't count him among the greatest
masters," said Mr. Bent, " because he can't
paint pimples." Again, later, in an argument
on education with his friend Plummer, Mr. Bent
remarks : " Knowledge only begins where
middle-classdom ends. The art of being middle
class consists in shutting yourself up in a de-
tached house and only recognising the people
who come in at the front door. Knowledge

MR. BENT 141

leads to the back door and the streets, and is
therefore fatal to the art ; and knowledge is
the goal of education ! . . . The English middle
classes never have believed in education. The
Scotch did once, till they discovered the superior
merits of football."

His remarks are always pertinent and valuable.
Here is one a propos of Chowdler :

" What does amaze me is that, with all his
experience, Chowdler has never learned that,
boys encourage us in our illusions by quot-
ing at us our own pet ideas and phrases. . . ."

Or again, talking of the value of experience :
" Pooh! experience, indeed ; what's experience?
a snare and a delusion, unless you can bring an
unbiased mind to bear on it, which school-
masters never can. The man who looks at this
view, for the first time, with the naked eye, sees
far more of it than the man who looks at it for
the hundredth time through smoked glasses.
Experience is the smoke on the glasses ; it's the
curse of our profession. We are all much more
efficient when we're young than we ever are
afterwards."

On the occasion of a house match : "To an
observer of human nature," Mr. Bent explained,
" nothing is so illuminating as the behaviour
of a housemaster when his house is playing a
match. Chowdler, of course, is elemental, and
offers few points of interest ; he has the naked
simplicity of the savage or the sportsman —
blatant in victory, ungenerous in defeat. But
Trimble is more complex and therefore more

142 A GALLERY OF SCHOOLMASTERS

worthy of study. If I join him, he will affect
an air of complete detachment and ask me for
my views on Welsh Disestablishment or Woman
Suffrage ; but he will interrupt himself at in-
tervals to murmur, ' Fools ! asses ! idiots ! They
deserve to be beaten ! ' "

" Chowdler being beaten," he continues later,
"is a much more amusing spectacle than
Chowdler winning. But I don't regard it as
possible. He always keeps a reserve force — a
kind of territorial army — of lean and hungry
veterans with Christian names who have grown
old in the service of their country. I am credibly
informed that his senior fag, whom I see in the
field, is a widower and maintains a family of
four at Brighton. They all belong to the class
which Chowdler designates as ' poor old ' or
■ good old,' and against this combination of
age, godliness, and thrift, no ordinary house
Eleven stands a chance."

This conversation occurred immediately be-
fore a most strenuous house match which
Chowdler 's house just managed to win after a
titanic struggle. " Mr. Chowdler was swept away
by a wave of intense, almost religious emotion.
Foul play, monstrous decisions, past and present
wrongs, were all forgotten for the moment. If
the headmaster had come up and grasped him
by the hand, he would have fallen upon the
headmaster's neck — he would have fallen upon
anybody's neck. Never since the relief of
Ladysmith, where his own son was beleaguered,
had he experienced such a sense of thankfulness,

CONCLUSIONS 143

joy, and exultation. Perhaps it was an un-
conscious association of ideas which made him
say to Mr. Tipham as he passed him : ' Thank
God ! We have kept the flag flying.' ' Where ? '
asked Mr. Tipham icily."

The result of this remarkable book has been
that in every school where The Lanchester
Tradition has been read the types represented
by Chowdler, Bent, Flaggon, and Tipham have
not only been recognised, but a universal vote
would seem to show that here at any ra'te is no
caricature. These four men really " live and
move and have their being."

Now I have done, and I hope you find it a
pleasant interlude. Surely in my own criti-
cisms I have not been so wrong when by hap-
hazard selection among great writers of every
age I find every one to agree with my point of
view.

However that may be, I can only press on in
the hope that my fictional gallery has helped to
impress on j^ou the necessity for a change from
a regime that permits of such teachers and such
schools.

CHAPTER XVII

COMMON ROOM

There are many variations of Masters' Common
Rooms, but the two main types may be roughly
divided into those which are used as a club
where masters meet and feed twice or thrice
daily, — that is to say, Common Rooms in
which men live almost entirely and are thrown
upon the society of each other at every spare
moment of the day, — and those Common Rooms
where masters go, just by chance, for a smoke,
to read the papers, and to find if possible a
friend when they feel lonely.

It follows at once that the latter is the rarer
but infinitely finer of the two ; we will therefore
leave it to the last. Schools conducted on the
hostel system, where feminine influence is tabu,
naturally economise by compelling their staffs
to have their meals together.

Now breakfast of all meals is the one which
the normal man prefers to eat alone, in peace,
with the companionship only of his morning
paper.

To share his habitual early morning " grumpi-
ness " with thirty other irritable spirits, twenty-
five of whom are thoroughly peevish because

A TYPE 145

they cannot get at the papers which the five
lucky ones do not appear to be reading, only
serves to make a man really upset with life. He
is ready to complain about everything : the
weather, his food, his correspondence or the
lack of it, the silly prattle of his neighbours,
everything. I do not know anywhere which
compares with a public school Common Room
at breakfast for sheer downright rudeness and
lack of courtesy.

After breakfast, irritability breaks out almost
into feuds between cliques ; a quite junior man
will have taken most of the fire, and a ton of
heavy asides about upstarts will be levelled at him
by his seniors until he has the decency to go off
to his rooms to correct work.

At the end of a hard day all the masters meet
again for dinner. You might think that the
cares of the day being over, a genial spirit of
camaraderie would pervade the room. Not a
bit of it . Rare indeed are those evenings when
some luckless wight is not being hauled over
the coals for omitting to tell a housemaster
that he had caned So-and-so, had forgotten
to punish .So-and-so, had been seen smoking
too near the school, had invited a certain boy
too often to tea, had vented his wrath on the
head of some poor innocent whose only fault
was that he worked too hard.

Quarrels are only lightly disguised in these
rooms. I have known two masters sit next to
each other for two months, at two meals daily,
and not interchange one syllable of conversation

146 COMMON ROOM

— for all the world as if they were two sulky
schoolgirls in the nursery.

There are many things that cause chafing
among the very susceptible members of an
average school staff. No drink, for instance,
is ever allowed at Henstridge, only the senior
vice-master has the privilege of imbibing seltzer-
water for his health ; no smoking except the
cheapest of cheap cigarettes provided by the
Common Room steward at a profit out of all
proportion to their worth.

The atmosphere by the eighth or ninth week
of term is charged with electricity : I have often
wondered when two pugilistic-minded members
of our fraternity would come to blows ; and
very near it do we get before the end of any
term.

I would not dwell long upon such a Common
Room : it is altogether evil ; but it does exist.

At the other end of the scale we get the Common
Room which really serves a useful purpose ; it
is the more ordinary type and exists in schools
where most of the staff are married and are
scattered about the town. It becomes then a
real pleasure to have some meeting-place where
we may discuss the match of yesterday, the plans
for to-morrow's field day, or in a friendly manner
quarrel over the absurd line taken by our
acquaintance's favourite daily journal.

There are moments, of course, when such a
room is to be avoided ; at those " breaks " in
the day's work when there is not time to go home,
but there is time for a smoke and conversation :

CONVERSATION 147

then thirty men crowd and jostle one another in
a room built to hold four or six comfortably.

Of course to a journalist in search of copy
any Common Room is a godsend, for there he
will hear scraps of conversation which will
provide him with valuable matter for his next
school story.

He will hear why young Jenkins has never been
caned, although he has deserved it daily for
terms ; he will hear repeated all those heavy
sarcasms which Donaldson daily inflicts on his
form ; he will hear all the reasons why various
victories and defeats have not been made public ;
he will hear healthy abuse of Williams by de
Vincey, while Williams is out of the room, and
equally violent abuse of de Vincey by Williams,
while de Vincey is out of the room. He will hear
all the local gossip, and a moment after the origin
of phrases like " Hobson s choice," and "It's all
my eye and Betty Martin " ; he will hear
learned disquisitions scattered with much classi-
cal quotation on Architecture, Home Rule, Serbia,
Lord Northcliffe, Women, the O.T.C., Physical
Drill, Geometry, and Aircraft.

But perhaps our young and keen new master
will think that in the Common Room he will find,
in the absence of his elders, much fine literary
fare : he will be sadly disappointed.

The Spectator, Blackwood's Magazine, Land and
Water, and The Nineteenth Century about exhaust
the stock of periodicals to which a normal Com-
mon Room runs .

Few indeed allow the Liberal papers a hearing.
11

1 48 COMMON ROOM

The Nation, The Saturday Review, Cornhill, The
Fortnightly, the lighter weeklies, all the periodi-
cals that you see in any mess are absent just
where you would most naturally expect them ;
for if a schoolmaster is not liberal-minded, an
omnivorous reader, how can you expect him to
teach liberal-mindedness and a broad view of
life?

A Common Room ought to be stocked with
every variety of paper, magazine, and book. It
ought to be a complete reference library. It
ought to be a place where a man can procure
every sort of smoke and drink, both of which
make for good comradeship. It ought to be up-
holstered and kept like a good London club, a
place where you can dine and give dinners, if
you wish it, to any friends.

It ought to be a place over the portal of which
should be written : " All shop abandon ye who
enter here."

No petty school scandal or querulous com-
plaint about the routine ought to be so much as
mentioned : men should cast their gowns in the
vestibule, and enter as free men of the world,
citizens where all school degrees should be for-
gotten : just friends anxious to throw oif the
burden of the day, so that in each other's society
they may find matter for recuperation in them-
selves. A glorious vision, but, oh 1 how sadly far
away and impossible ! Until schoolmasters are
paid a minimum wage of £1000 a year such things
can hardly be. So again do we see the power of
wealth.

CHAPTER XVIII

A MASTERS' MEETING

Masters' meetings vary very much in kind and
in degree.

They depend vastly upon two things : the
type of headmaster who presides over them,
and the time of the term in which they are
held.

With regard to the latter first.

The first meeting of a school term, usually
held on the day before the boys come back, is
almost hilarious ; every man is genuinely
pleased to be back at his work, genuinely glad
to meet his fellow-craftsmen. All are healthy,
free of care, bronzed, full of anecdotes of
Scotland, work with the Army or Red Cross,
accidents by flood or field, record climbs,
wonderful walks or motor tours, quaint friend-
ships which they made, mutual acquaintances
with whom they came into contact.

It is with difficulty that they can be got to
bring their minds down to the schedule and
change of routine which is about to be proposed .

The meeting starts quietly enough with little
or no discussion about points that usually arise,
but are considered as trifling, petty.

150 A MASTERS' MEETING

The scheme of work for the term is read out,
and each man tots up his spare hours to see if
he is being let off more or less work than he is
accustomed to. Whisperings are heard between
friends. "Oh, Heavens! what's the use of
being out between 10.15 and 10.45? What I
want is an extra half. Old Dodson has two
extras a week : he can get away practically
whenever he likes."

"I do like a chance of a good bath and a
sound tea after Corps Parade, and now I'm
switched on to modern shell French at 4.15 on
Tuesdays : curse it."

Subdued murmurs of this nature keep us all
occupied until a startling change is read out :

"In future no boy may go to the following
shops without leave."

Half the staff is up in arms at once. One
housemaster declares that his boys have dealt
at such and such a shop, now tabu, for over
one hundred years ; another points out that
Spofforth's is the only tailor within reach of
his house ; he is peculiarly averse from allowing
his boys into the south end of the town — and
so on. For half an hour the debate rages :
solely between housemasters, for it is house-
masters alone who are concerned. That is the
way with most masters' meetings.

They are held at a time which causes the
younger men to curtail their holiday quite
needlessly by twenty-four hours, for there is
never anything mooted which so concerns
them that it could not all be written down on

THE CASE OF MARTIN MINOR 151

a sheet of memorandum paper and delivered
to them on the first day of term.

Hours of precious time are spent in a dis-
cussion as to whether cricket shall precede
choir practice, or choir practice cricket ; music-
master and games manager have a wordy
battle which threatens to last through the
night ; meanwhile the rest, oblivious of the
point at issue, or caring nothing for it, settle
down to a book, if they have had the good
sense to bring one in, or to drawing caricatures
of their neighbours, if they are bookless.

I suppose, in fact I know, that many boys
think these meetings to be wonderful affairs in
which matters of state, of the greatest secrecy,
are openly divulged and discussed.

I say that I know this, for what else could
have induced that sportsman of long ago,
Martin mi, whose valiant death at Hooge we
all mourned only so little a time ago, to have
concealed himself under the table during one
of these meetings and courted the severe flogging
which such an exploit was most certainly not
worth ? Incidentally, though the boy heard no
secrets, and never would, however many such
meetings he clandestinely attended, he did
receive his thrashing, for he had the misfortune
to hit on a day when the headmaster chose to
remain behind after the meeting was over for
three hours working over a knotty point in a
revised scheme. The boy, driven to despair,
could stand it no longer after 10 p.m., and
crawled ignominiously from his hiding-place

152 A MASTERS' MEETING

and stood, waiting for judgment, before his
chief.

It is said, too, that clusters of boys used to
rush into the room as soon as it was vacated
on the off chance of seeing some damning piece
of evidence written down and carelessly left
behind. Their astonishment must have been
great when they found no incriminating docu-
ments, but only little crumpled pieces of paper
with —

11 You swine ! where 's your Common Room
sub ? "

M What about that bottle of whisky ? "

11 Can you poss. dine — the usual time ? "

" Aren't you fed up with this ? Chicky's in
for the night," scribbled on them, varied by gross
libels on the facial disfigurements of most of the
masters by such as could or could not draw.

But nowadays the school custos sweeps away
every piece of paper immediately after a
meeting, so that no trace of the mysterious
talk, no vulgar caricature of the chaplain or art
master may be treasured up by souvenir-seeking
youth.

As a matter of fact, boys always seem to know
more of the internal government of the school
than any except the housemasters.

There are those of us who think it rather pitiful,
if not wantonly outrageous, that we are kept in
the dark about some great catastrophe which
has overtaken the community for which we, in
our small way, are just as responsible as the
housemasters ; and sometimes when we feel

AGENDA 153

that the atmosphere is heavily charged and that
there is a big row impending we wonder when first
we shall be officially told.

As a matter of fact, we are never told, and as
a consequence give ourselves away hopelessly
in form for weeks after through pure ignorance.
No — like most meetings of Secret Societies,
masters' meetings accomplish very little.

Except at the beginning of term they are as
often simply an occasion for the display of ill-
feeling : every man has his own axe to grind,
his own boys to push forward, his own bete noire
to crush ; and for my part I would abolish all
meetings between the eighth and last week of
term, because the nerves of most of us by that
time are so shattered that we say more than
we mean in our eagerness to have our own way
and to dethrone an adversary.

The last meeting of term is, of course, necessary,
but even then most men are already clad in
holiday garb, an unconscious symbol that they
are already in mind far away from the school,
and their hearts are not altogether in the matters
under discussion.

This time, if a boy came in and gathered
up the fragments of notes, he would probably
gather the impression that Bradshaw was the
major topic of discussion.

But as I said at the beginning, as well as the
time and the place, it is the headmaster that
alters the character of these meetings.

The autocratic tyrant who convenes a
meeting solely for the sake of hearing his own

154 A MASTERS' MEETING

voice, and throws out suggestions, meaning them
to become laws in any case, can scarcely be
said to be doing the school much good by calling
together his staff to hear new rules that he
might just as well have printed and circulated
without talking about them.

Such a man only invites covert animosity by
saying, " Gentlemen, I propose to change the
school game from Soccer to Rugger : I should
like to hear your views." Follows, somewhat
naturally, an almost panic-stricken howl with
one accord from nearly every one. He listens
patiently for half an hour and then cuts in
with —

" Thank you, gentlemen ; I have been much
interested. I cannot say that you have con-
vinced me that I am wrong ; but I am glad to
have heard your point of view : none the less
we shall play Rugger as from the first day of
next term. And now, gentlemen, to pass to the
next point, I propose to bring in a new rule about
boys going from one house to another or to
masters' houses. I do not think any good is to
be derived from too much communication of
boys with one another (outside their own houses)
or with masters. Masters will therefore see to
it that in future no boy is entertained at their
houses unless he happens to be a member of that
house. I have several adequate reasons for this,
but I should be glad to hear what my colleagues
have to say."

His colleagues have to say a great deal, but
he dismisses them, when he wishes to proceed,

THE HEADMASTER 155

in a word, " Thank you, gentlemen ; there is
just one other point I wish to raise, the
question of attendance in chapel ..." So it
goes on. To attend such a meeting is like being
a courtier in the palace of a sultan, or that
famous one in Alice in Wonderland : " Off with
his head."

These strong, self-willed men have their uses :
as the " boss " of a cotton combine, for instance, or
as an unscrupulous newspaper proprietor such
a man would be invaluable. As the headmaster
of such a delicate organism as a public school
he is worse than useless ; he is comparable only
to a child attempting to mend a valuable wrist-
watch by twisting its works about with a rusty
nail. Luckily this type is not common. The
more normal headmaster really uses these
meetings as gauges to see which way the wind
blows ; he collects his staff in order to ascertain
their united or individual opinions on every
branch of school life. The unfortunate part of
the business is that such excellent gatherings
should nearly always degenerate into quibbles
between opponents with regard to some quite
trivial by-product of school life, whereas by a
little unselfishness, a little leaven of idealism,
such meetings might be invaluable as showing
the temper, aims, failures, and successes of the
school.

Just as there is a distinctly felt, but quite un-
analysable atmosphere in every school, quite
different from every other ; just as you can
always distinguish an old Wykehamist from an

156 A MASTERS' MEETING

old Harrovian almost as soon as you speak to
him, so is there an indefinable something which
characterises and yet differentiates every school
staff. And this something is in nearly all cases
very precious : it is consolidated and naturally
most felt when the staff meet together. If they
are tactfully handled by a sympathetic head-
master, all the best that is in each of them will
come out at these meetings ; each man will
have something to say, some quota to contribute
to the general welfare of the school. But there
must be sympathy ; there must be a full and
adequate understanding between the different
members ; and, above all, youthfulness with
its consequent bold experiments should not be
crushed or discouraged, but shown gently how
to tell its wheat from its tares.

There is always a danger in most masters'
meetings of settling down into two rabid camps,
age versus youth : the old men openly deriding
the proposals of the young men ; the young
men covertly sneering at the antiquated, obsolete
methods of the old.

If only a gentler spirit were encouraged so that
the old would not think themselves too perfect
to learn from the young, if only the young were
not so sure of themselves that they pay no heed
to the excellent side of the old, there might be a
far finer system of education in vogue now than
actually exists.

We hope (almost in vain) for a millennium when
these meetings will be frequent and characterised
by frankness and friendliness, when every sort of

SOME SUGGESTED REFORMS 157

topic concerned with school life will be rationally
discussed, and remedies and changes brought
about with less rancour and desperate ill-feeling
than at present obtains.

Either a masters' meeting is an occasion for
full and free discussion or it is an unmitigated
nuisance, an intolerable bore, an occasion for
evil-speaking and evil-thinking at the worst,
or placid contempt and aloofness, followed by
practice in the art of the caricature, at its best.
Either abolish them altogether if they concern
two-thirds of the company not at all, or if they
refuse to discuss the management of the school,
or make them much more frequent and allow
every man the right to suggest reforms or the
abolition of some existent fungus.

CHAPTER XIX

END OF TERM

The last weeks of term are very like the last
three hundred yards of a three-mile race. All
through the preceding months you have been
strenuously trying to move at your fastest speed,
and by the end of the twelfth week are so tired
that you doubt whether you can last another lap,
when suddenly you are faced with examinations
and have to redouble your efforts. Papers that
have to be refreshing and original, when you are
dying of exhaustion and have no mind left, are
not the joy to set that parents imagine. The
blue-pencilling of errors that seem to crop up a
millionfold more abundantly at the time of trial
than ever they did in practice make you gnaw
your moustache with rage, and certainly do not
raise the laughter in you which they seem to
cause among the readers of Punch. The con-
stant sitting-in and invigilating are far more
boring and deadly than teaching the most stupid
of boys the most lifeless of subjects.

Night after night you are deprived of sleep by
having to stay up till the small hours correcting
hundreds of papers, and then, after one agelong

week of such life, you have to collect all your

158

LAST DAYS 159

results and make up orders that appear to you
to be far from correct, and you have to report on
the excellence (how rare !) and the failure (how
extraordinarily frequent !) of each boy whom
you have examined. The last day comes, and
with it a final burst, almost with teeth and fists
clenched and eyes shut in your frenzy to get
everything done in time, and you find yourself,
with hair touzled, temper lost, rings under your
eyes, and cheeks hollow and sunken, on the plat-
form in Big School listening to the parting words
of advice from the headmaster to the assembled
three hundred.

" It has been a better term than might have
been expected ; of course your corps work has
been the predominant feature, and now don't
imagine that you can relax your efforts in the
holidays. The happiness of your coming free
time is going to be the sort of happiness that
comes from helping others ; there is work for you
to do, in the Y.M.C.A. army tents, or as advised
by the Cavendish Association, about which I
have just told you. ..." The terminal concert
follows, filled with khaki-clad old boys at the
back, who have, by a miracle, all obtained leave
to come back for a farewell visit before going out
to the Front.

Stanford's rendering of " The Revenge "
causes us to feel thrills of pride of country and
of our naval history, thrills which become in-
tensified as we listen to " The Death of Nelson,"
sung immediately afterwards by one who has
just gained his commission and leaves us to-

160 END OF TERM

morrow ; all the National Anthems of the Allies
and the school " Carmen " make the rafters ring
again, and we all troop out to house suppers,
informal gatherings of friendly cliques over a
last meal ; none of the old formality, calling
attention to this or that cup or colour won, this
or that success gained. No, this term we just
sit down anywhere, cheerfully " ragging " our
nearest neighbours, and shout for songs or
speeches as we feel like them . . . and so to
bed, but not to sleep.

The boys from over-excitement, the thoughts
of the liberty of the morrow, the masters from
over-fatigue, toss and turn through the night
but scarcely sleep.

As soon as dawn breaks, up rises the entire
school, pillow-fights follow, friendly feuds, a last
packing of trifles, a careless farewell, and 8.40
sees the school close deserted, forsaken, quiet.

In the streets in the morning may be seen
stragglers who have been kept back for some
breach of rules, mortified beyond expression,
scowling at every passer-by, almost counting the
minutes until the time of release. Master meets
master aimlessly wandering about, and greets
him with, " Good, isn't it, to have absolutely
nothing to do for a day ? "

At two o'clock the main quadrangle is peopled
again for the last time for four weeks with
toga-ed figures hurrying with mark-books and
suggestions to the Common Room for the masters'
meeting. Faced with a clean piece of foolscap
on which to write his thoughts, each man

ADIEUX 161

immediately begins to pencil out a ghastly
sketch of his neighbour with fiendish delight,
and then, as if proud of the result, to continue
to repeat the operation a hundred times on
every available space until the meeting is over.

Promotions are read out, prizes are awarded,
notes of extreme urgency are passed from
master to master ; some hurriedly add up
marks with feverish energy, others, frankly
bored, yawn and close their eyes.

At last it is over. A buzz of conversation
breaks out ; names like Edinburgh, Devonport,
Eastbourne, Tidworth, Buxton, take the place
of marks. Every one is free, free for four whole
weeks : free to smoke where he likes, free to
wear what clothes he likes — this meeting is a
revelation in sartorial taste : normally we are
indistinguishable one from another — blue suits,
black ties, dark shoes and socks make us all
alike, but to-day is a kind of " coming of
spring " ; the lightest of light Norfolk coats,
soft silk collars and garishly coloured ties, socks
of delicate greys and browns, waistcoats even
more daring, all these clash strangely with our
sombre surroundings in this old oak room.

No more getting up at unearthly hours, nor
hustling through meals in order to get to school
in time ; from being merely masters of others,
for a brief space of time we are now permitted
to be masters of ourselves. Strange, too, how
the grey old courts change in a twinkling.
This morning saw them full of myriad boys
scuttling away for their trains ; lunch-time

1 62 END OF TERM

saw them deserted as a disused mill ; now we
pour out of Common Room and hear the ringing
laughter of children and girls. The masters'
wives and daughters have usurped our sacred
precincts for a game of hockey, and newly
returned boys from far - away preparatory
schools are showing how immeasurably superior
they are now at the game to their elders or
friends of old.

A short farewell for our colleagues, and we
separate to the ends of the earth. No talk,
however, this time of walking tours and
Mediterranean voyages under the guidance of
one Doctor Lunn ; what all our conversation
turns on is, " What regiment are you attached
to ? What ? Good Lord ! Tidworth for
Easter ? And take your own blankets ! What
a sweat ! Oh ! I'm going to the 9th East
Lanes, Kitchener's, at Eastbourne. So long,
old boy. Cheeroh ! "

My train doesn't go for another hour ; my
house is shut up, everything put away, now
bare and ugly. I cannot face it, so I take my
bicycle and go up over West Hill for a last look
at my favourite scenery.

As I go along I find myself living over again
the petty trials and triumphs of the term.
Yonder gap in the field was the scene of my
capture on night operations in March. Oh,
bitter moment I Those fields where the trees
cluster together are where I outflanked old
" Toothpick," who thinks his platoon inviolable.
That plough to which we are just coming marks

REGRETS 163

the end of a grand seventy-minute run with the
Beagles, only two up at the death and they
11 dead to the world."

On this road how often in the dust, or the
rain, or the wind have we marched gaily along
as a corps I I can almost hear the " Carmen "
now as we rend the air with our shouts. Oh !
boys, boys, why will you make us love you
so, and passing, forget ? . . . M But no more
of that, for that way sadness lies."

At the summit of the hill, panting, I stand
on the top of a high hedge and survey the great,
bare, rolling downs which stretch before me
all over the south of Wessex, just beginning
to revive again with the joyous birth of spring.
What a country ! How hard to leave you when
the time comes ! I have brought to you my
sorrows and my joys, and always you have
filled me with comfort. It seems ungrateful in
me to leave you now. It was ever the same.

Anxious, pining for the holidays to come,
when they arrive I find myself bored, irritable,
restless, unwilling to go away. Hurriedly I
turn my back, mount my bicycle, and descend
into the valley.

The train comes in all too soon. Reluctantly
I take my seat in it and settle back to think . . .
and then a stranger starts to talk. Back to
the war — back to the world — the school doors
are shut ; I am as if I had never been near
school. Yet to-morrow at home the ache will
be worse. These first few days of the holidays,
they are terrible ; the longing for those merry,
12

1 64 END OF TERM

careless voices, even for those worries and hours
of overwork, all would be welcome contrasted
with our life of aimless meanderings at home.

We write many letters to friends to keep us
in touch with the life we have left, to every
boy of whom we can think, to nearly all our
colleagues ; and gradually Time, the only healer
of wounds, causes the pain to be less severe,
our longing to be less poignant — the holidays
have begun.

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Junior Course, 2s. 6d. Intermediate Course, 2s. 6d.

Senior Course, 3s. 6d.

II — Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 1625 — 1780.

Junior Course, 2s. 6d. Intermediate Course, 2s. 6d.

Senior Course, 3s. 6d.

IH_Nineteenth Century, 1780—1880.

Junior Course, 2s. 6d. Intermediate Course, 2s. 6d.
Senior Course, 3s. 6d.

Junior Course — For Higher Elementary Schools, Preparatory
Schools (Higher Forms), Lower Forms in Secondary Schools, and
Evening Schools.

Intermediate Course — For Middle Forms of Secondary Schools,
Pupil Teachers, and Higher Evening Schools.

Senior Course — For the Higher Forms of Secondary Schools,
Teachers in Training, University Extension Students and University
Undergraduates.

LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W

THE LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Santa Barbara

THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE
STAMPED BELOW.

Series 9482